Ruling Party Leader Mocks #Teleormanleaks, Shows Up With Two Briefcases At Party Meeting

Before entering what was expected to be a tense PSD executive committee meeting on Monday, the party chairman took a couple of minutes to open the briefcases in front of the journalists.

One of the briefcases contained doughnuts, which Dragnea said belonged to the investigative reporting site (a reference to a Romanian idiom with the meaning of lies or distorted truth, ed.), while the other had a number of mock documents referencing scandals involving President Klaus Iohannis.

“As you well know, I’m from Teleorman and as any townsperson from Teleorman I found a briefcase with documents not yet sent to the National Anticorrupation Director. Let us see what’s in here. Look, case 01, the loan contract with Raiffeisen. Retrocessions towards the German Forum of the German ethnic group. 03 – Promoting prosecutors who closed his files. 04 – Statements on sums received from rent (…) and we have some more USB sticks,” Dragnea said before entering the meeting.

Regarding the actual leak, the ruling party leader called it “nonsense” and an attempt to “cover up” another current scandal on the 2016 appointment of General Prosecutor Augustin Lazar.

“It’s nonsense, it’s desperation, probably to cover the scandal surrounding Mr. Lazar, only that this scandal cannot be circumvented, buried (…) I have thousands of photos with Romanians. There could appear thousands of briefcases with my photos,” added Romania’s Lower Chamber chairman.

Investigative news outlet RISE Project announced on Saturday that it received a briefcase containing important documents related to Teleorman constructions company Tel Drum, famously linked to Romanian Lower Chamber Chairman Liviu Dragnea and the target of an OLAF-initiated corruption case.

According to RISE Project, the briefcase contains “essential information from within Tel Drum, which was not found by anticorruption prosecutors when they raided the company last year”. This includes a 63 GB hard-drive with thousands of company bills, bank statements, documents which establish false companies, and tens of thousands of emails from a high-ranked company official.

The company has been linked for a long time with Social Democrat Party leader Liviu Dragnea, although he never officially held any office within it. It held near monopoly over public construction works in the county during Dragnea’s stint as Teleorman county council chairman, between 2000 and 2012.

Tel Drum is currently investigated by anticorruption prosecutors following a notification by the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), under the suspicion of having been illegally assigned an EU-funded public road restoration contract in the county.

Dragnea himself was officially indicted in the case by National Anticorruption Directorate in November 2017, being accused of multiple offences such as forming an organized criminal group, fraudulently using documents or statements to obtain EU funds and abuse of office for favoring Tel Drum when granting the contract.

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