TV host Dan Diaconescu arrested

Newsroom 28/06/2010 | 11:22

OTV television station owner and anchorman Dan Diaconescu was arrested and released last week while with TV producer Doru Parv, remains arrested after they were charged with blackmailing a local mayor from Arad county.

Parv was previously charged with blackmail in February. Diaconescu also appeared before anticorruption prosecutors the same month, as a witness regarding the complaint filed by Ioan Mot, mayor of a commune in Arad, against Parv. Mot allegedly accused Parv of soliciting a bribe in order not to make public discrediting images of the mayor on OTV, Diaconescu’s TV channel. According to the warrant to start criminal investigations against Diaconescu, dated June 18, the anchorman threatened Mot, both directly and through Parv, in an attempt to blackmail the mayor for EUR 200,000.

Last Tuesday morning, Diaconescu and Parv were detained by Romanian anticorruption prosecutors for 24 hours, after the two were charged with blackmail the day before. The pair were held under preventive arrest on Wednesday, after a lower Bucharest court approved the prosecutor’s request. The defendants’ lawyers, however, will appeal the court’s ruling, through the Bucharest Court.