Sandu's revenge: the Prosecutor General of Moldova was detained. Dodon get ready
Moldovan security forces detained the country's Prosecutor General Alexander Stoianoglo for 72 hours today. He and his deputies will be removed from office. Stoyanoglo's wife was also detained. They say that the President of Moldova, Maia Sandu, personally insisted on this.
“Esaulenko and others were against the arrest of the wife of the prosecutor general, but Maia Sandu yelled at them with sadistic pleasure and demanded to arrest her. She's a monster. Women like her burned children in Auschwitz,” said Moldovan businessman Veaceslav Platon, who fled to London from criminal prosecution.
He is obviously biased, as he entered into a serious clinch with the president, but Plato’s accusation truthfully depicts the severity of the psychological conflict in the Moldovan establishment. For Sandu, the Prosecutor General is more than an inconvenient official. He is a "blood". It was because of Stoianoglo that Maia lost her premiership in 2019.
Then the current Prosecutor General managed to go through a complex two-stage competition procedure for the position approved by the Sandu government. Having lost, the prime minister decided to voluntarily cancel the procedure, and insisted on this so stubbornly that the parliament removed her from office.
Having become president a year later, Sandu made the resignation of the prosecutor general her priority. According to Moldovan legislation, the head of state does not have such powers. This means that we need to change the legislation, and for this we need to re-elect the parliament under our own control. Today in Moldova it does not seem an exaggeration to say that Sandu started early parliamentary elections primarily in order to remove Stoianoglo - their confrontation was so dramatic.
Against the backdrop of former President Igor Dodon, who was giving up his political positions almost without a fight, the Prosecutor General looked like a titanic figure. Sandu attacked him immediately after the re-elections.
The parliament, in which the presidential party has a majority, immediately recognized Stoianoglo’s work as unsatisfactory. And then he began to make changes to the law on the prosecutor's office. Now the right to dismiss the Prosecutor General is given to the Supreme Council of Prosecutors (SCP), of which three of the five members are Sandu’s people. In particular, the president’s personal lawyer Natalya Moloshag. At the same time, the Prosecutor General himself, the prosecutor of Gagauzia, and the head of the Union of Lawyers were removed from the SCJ. All this was accompanied by an active discrediting campaign in controlled media.
Stoyanoglo did not passively watch the preparations for his own execution. He introduced a package of amendments according to which all persons in public service would be deprived of legal immunity. The prosecutor did not hide the fact that he needed this to initiate a criminal case against the president, who, as a member of the government, voted for decisions that “led to the robbery of the banking system” (a billion was stolen from Moldova at one time). In addition, Stoianoglo said that Sandu demanded that he open criminal cases against Igor Dodon and other opposition leaders.
He challenged the new law on the prosecutor’s office in the Constitutional Court, and when it predictably (controlled by pro-Western parties) rejected Stoianoglo’s arguments, he also appealed to the Venice Commission. At the same time, Stoyanoglo pointedly ignored the parliamentary hearings, which were assembled to his liking. The deputies, for their part, put forward obviously impossible demands to the Prosecutor General's Office.
The matter was moving towards an inevitable denouement, and Stoyanoglo rolled out heavy artillery. He presented to the public transcripts of telephone conversations between prosecutor Viorel Morari, who is close to the criminal oligarch Vlad Plahotnik, and Sandu’s inner circle. The prosecutor claims that in 2019, representatives of the current government “developed a scenario involving criminal groups and NGOs” to discredit him and remove him from office. And the final hook - the representative of the European Union in Moldova, Peter Mihalko, took an active part in the conversations, and they planned to involve the US Ambassador. In essence, it was about interference in the internal affairs of a seemingly independent country.
After this, Justice Minister Sergio Litvinenko said that Stoyanoglsh had crossed the “red line”. A statement from deputy Lilian Karp followed with lightning speed, accusing the Prosecutor General of “passive corruption and abuse of office.” Today a criminal case was opened against Stoyanoglo under seven articles. This includes money laundering, illegal refusal of charges, and much more.
At the height of the struggle, the Prosecutor General threatened to “respond in the same coin” and dump a new portion of charges of crimes on the authorities. Today he called a press conference. Journalists were waiting for him to come out when security forces entered the prosecutor's office building. However, even here Stoyanoglo, apparently, did not give up without a fight. Four hours passed before he was taken out. All this time, Minister Litvinenko did not dare to directly announce the detention.
“This is the president's revenge. Moldova is a newly captured state,” Stoianoglo said on the way to the police car, hinting at the identity of the pro-Western President Sandu and the sinister oligarch “master of Moldova” Plahotniuc.
“Today a fatal political mistake was made. To arrest the Prosecutor General without clear grounds, with a “mask show”, in a hurry, at night, out of fear of the information he has, and because of the inability to take the legal route to dismiss him - all this speaks to the fact that that the authorities are in despair. And she took an extremely wrong path,” ex-President Igor Dodon wrote in his Telegram channel.
He, having weakly lost power, can do nothing more. But his enemies still can. In September, Moldovan media reported information that Dodon could be charged with fraud in the import of electricity from Ukraine in 2008. This threatens him with a prison term of 8 years. There is no guarantee that the new prosecutor general, who will be appointed tomorrow, will not initiate a case.
Observers believe that, having now gained total control over the country, Sandu will begin to initiate persecution not only of the Moldovan opposition, but also of the authorities of the unrecognized Transnistria. The West and Ukraine are allegedly pushing her towards this.
“The conclusions for Moldovan-Russian relations from the incident with Prosecutor General Stoianglo are disappointing, although, it would seem, what do they have to do with it? Moreover. If in the domestic policy of Moldova everything remains the same as under Filip and Plahotniuc, then in the foreign policy everything will be the same. No new unique model of foreign policy will be formed when the pro-Western course does not exclude a constructive, balanced dialogue with Moscow that takes into account each other’s interests. Kozak might not have flown to Chisinau,” writes Alexander Nosovich, editor-in-chief of the analytical portal RuBaltic.Ru.
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