Ex-minister and presidential candidate Elena Udrea gets 6-year jail sentence

The controversial former minister of tourism and regional development Elena Udrea was handed down a 6-year jail sentence for taking bribes and abuse in office in a case involving the organization of a boxing gala for Lucian Bute in Bucharest while she was in office.

The decision taken by judges at Romania’s High Court can be appealed.

Udrea, who was a candidate in the presidential elections from 2014, was hoping that judges would rule out that she wasn’t guilty. During the trial, she claimed she was innocent.

She had also been accused by anti-graft prosecutors of attempting to use fake or incomplete data, but she was acquitted by the court.

Udrea was tried alongside seven other people in this case, including former minister of Economy Ion Ariton and the former director of the National Investment Company, Ana Maria Topoliceanu. Topoliceanu got suspended jail sentences, while Ariton was found not guilty.

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Gheorghe Anastasia, the former general secretary in the Ministry of Regional Development and Tourism, got a suspended jail sentence of four years in the same case.

Meanwhile, Rudel Obreja, the ex-president of Romania’s Boxing Federation, received a jail sentence of five years.

In short, prosecutors claimed that the boxing gala was financed illegally from public funds managed by the Ministry of Development.

According to the National Anticorruption Directorate, the Ministry inked a contract in the summer of 2011 with one of Obreja’s firms for the organization of the gala. The state paid RON 8 million for a promotional campaign during the boxing match.

In the last few years, Udrea claimed that she was the victim of a plot that was masterminded by the DNA and the domestic intelligence service SRI. At the beginning of 2015, the former MP was placed in preventive arrest in this case and in a separate file in which anti-graft prosecutors investigated the way in which the state acquired Microsoft software licenses from a Romanian distributor.

Udrea is also prosecuted in a separate case related to the financing of the presidential campaign of Traian Basescu in 2009.

The judges ordered Udrea to pay around EUR 3 million in damages in the “Gala Bute” file.