The court will review the case of former BEM head Viorel Topa, in which he was sentenced to 8 years

The Chisinau court has begun the process of reviewing the criminal case in which the former head of Banca de Economii Viorel Topa was sentenced to eight years in prison for embezzlement.

The repeated lawsuit, filed on May 3 this year, was transferred to Judge Elena Kostyuk from the Buiucani office, and the first hearing is scheduled for July. This happened after Judge Lilia Lupascu refused to accept the lawsuit for consideration in 2021, despite the fact that prosecutors dropped the charges against the convicted person and demanded the termination of criminal prosecution, noi.md reports with reference to anticoruptie.md.

In March 2021, the Prosecutor’s Office for Combating Organized Crime and Special Cases (POPOPOD) announced the start of a review procedure of the criminal case in which Viorel Topa was convicted of theft of someone else’s property on an especially large scale.

The decision to review was made on the basis of a petition by lawyer Viorel Topa, filed on October 5, 2020. At the same time, according to representatives of the law, the decision was made based on the results of additional investigations.

“After carrying out a series of prosecutorial actions, on March 10 of this year, the prosecutor presented all the materials with his conclusion to the court. According to the procedure, the court must check whether the legal requirements for initiating the review procedure have been met, and also re-evaluate the evidence, this time taking into account new evidence collected during the application of the emergency means of appeal,” the prosecutor’s office explained.

In June of the same year, the Chisinau court refused to initiate a review of the case. The decision was made by Magistrate Lilia Lupascu, despite the fact that prosecutors dropped the charges and demanded that the criminal prosecution be dropped.

Lawyer Dmitry Pavel told Anticoruptie.md that the Prosecutor General’s Office decided to begin the procedure for reviewing the case initiated against his client after an order from the Prosecutor General of 2001 was discovered in the archives, in which the criminal case was terminated for lack of corpus delicti.

“I don’t know how Lilia Lupascu motivated her decision. Initially, I suspected that this was the same judge who was also reviewing Plato’s case. But we cannot object to the random distribution of cases. And I hoped that justice had begun to change, but, It seems that this is not the case. We will challenge this decision in a higher authority,” the lawyer said then.

The criminal case against Viorel Topa was initiated in 2010 for acts committed between 2000 and 2001, for which he was sentenced to eight years in prison on January 13, 2012. The businessman was found guilty of providing a $1 million loan to AIR Moldova in December 2000, while serving as head of the Banca de Economii, using a $400,000 account with an offshore company as collateral. The company in question was allegedly controlled by Viorel Topa, who withdrew money from the account, therefore AIR Moldova was unable to fulfill its contractual obligations.

In May 2020, the Supreme Court of Justice declared inadmissible another lawsuit to review the case in which Tsopa was sentenced to a long prison sentence. The appeal to overturn the sentence was filed by the businessman’s lawyers in August 2019, after the Democratic Party left power and Vladimir Plahotniuc left the country.

Brothers Viorel and Victor Topa are in Germany and the German state has refused to extradite them. They still consider themselves innocent and claim that their cases were fabricated.