Former president of Professional Football League acquitted in embezzlement and tax evasion case by Bucharest Court of Appeals

Dumitru Dragomir, the former president of the Professional Football League (LPF), was finally acquitted by the Bucharest Court of Appeal on Tuesday for committing unlawful shareholdings in embezzlement with particularly serious consequences and tax evasion in connection with the sale of television rights to football matches.

Initially, Dumitru Dragomir was sentenced to seven years in prison by the Bucharest Tribunal for embezzlement and tax evasion, but the Bucharest Court of Appeals admitted his appeal on Tuesday and decided to acquit him.

The former President of the Professional Football League was sued in 2014, along with over 40 people, for evasion, embezzlement and money laundering, with a loss of about EUR 5.4 million.

Dumitru Dragomir was accused by prosecutors and irregularities in connection with the sale of TV rights for football matches. According to the prosecutors of the Prosecutor’s Office attached to the Bucharest Tribunal, the fraudsters network targeted in this file operated for five years between 2009 and 2014, using 17 ghost companies. The investigators described in the court referral how the network operated and say that the criminal mechanism was divided into five stages.

Some of the defendants in the file, as administrators of several companies, recorded fictitious operations in the accounting documents of these companies, consisting of unrealistic purchases of goods and services, according to the prosecutors. In order to hide the illicit origin of the amounts resulting from evasion, they were successively transferred to the bank accounts of the 17 fictitious companies, the amounts included in the fictitious invoices issued by those companies. The money was withdrawn, in cash, with the help of other persons involved in the file, and was returned “to the bag” of the defendants who had ordered the payments beforehand, after two other persons had received a commission of between 6 and 8 percent.