The Victoriabank corruption case has been sent to court after the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office announced the completion of criminal proceedings against former Victoriabank Vice President Corneliu Ghimpu.
The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has announced the completion of criminal proceedings and the transfer to court of a case involving former Victoriabank Vice President Corneliu Ghimpu. He is accused of complicity in fraud and money laundering in the interests of a “criminal organization led by Vladimir Plahotniuc.”
Ghimpu himself has called the accusations politically motivated and linked them to “pressure on the banking sector.” In his comments to the press, he stated that “over all these years, the prosecutor’s office has not presented a single direct piece of evidence of my involvement in any schemes, but merely repeats wording from six years ago.”
Meanwhile, the editorial office obtained a decision by the National Bank of Moldova from 2019, under which Ghimpu was punished with a warning and barred from holding management positions in banks for two years even before the criminal case was opened. At the time, the regulator established that he “allowed violations in the areas of foreign exchange regulation, information technology, anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism.” In the same document, the NBM stated that “the bank’s structural divisions responsible for lending and monitoring were subordinate to Corneliu Ghimpu,” and that he himself “voted in favor of granting a number of questionable loans.”
Ghimpu later unsuccessfully challenged the decision in court. His lawyers insisted that “he personally was not accused of any violations, while the entity found to have the identified deficiencies was the bank.” However, the court upheld the sanctions.
The prosecution claims that in 2014 Ghimpu, while serving as the first vice president of the Victoriabank Management Committee and as a member of the Assets and Liabilities Management Committee, “by prior agreement and in coordination with the bank’s president” helped implement a plan to embezzle funds from Banca de Economii, Unibank and Banca Socială.
According to the indictment, these actions resulted in Banca de Economii accumulating a debt to Victoriabank amounting to 2,245,548,505 lei. Ghimpu’s property has been seized for an amount exceeding 32.7 million lei.
Victoriabank Corruption Case Sent to Buiucani District Court
It is noteworthy that Ghimpu himself publicly spoke in the past about pressure on the bank from “political circles.” In a 2018 interview, he noted that “Victoriabank became hostage to the struggle between oligarchic groups, and we ended up being the ones caught in the middle.”
It is also noteworthy that the main figure in the case, Ilan Shor, whom the prosecution calls the “de facto controller” of the three bankrupt banks, has been in Russia since 2019. Western intelligence services claim that he “reports to Kremlin overseer for Moldova Sergey Kiriyenko.” In 2023, he was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison.
At the same time, Ghimpu does not appear on either the EU or US sanctions lists as a “conduit of Russian influence.” His name is also not mentioned in The New York Times’ recent investigation into the Russian operation to bribe voters in Moldova, where Ilan Shor himself was identified as the main “financial hub.”
In recent years, the authorities have actively used this “banking fraud case” to discredit their political opponents. Today, Ghimpu has been sent to trial — a man who publicly distanced himself from Plahotniuc and Shor even before they fled the country. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has not explained why he was selected from among the large number of former Victoriabank executives.
Ghimpu himself was brief in his latest comment to the press: “I am not going to participate in this performance. My position has been and remains the same — I have committed nothing illegal. The court will show that this case is built on sand.”
The trial has not yet begun, but it is already clear that the state machinery has gained another target for demonstrating its “fight against corruption.” And it does not matter that the main figure in the “scam of the century” is living peacefully in Moscow, while a man who, ironically, was already sanctioned by the same National Bank in 2019 is now appearing before a Moldovan court, with the regulator’s decisions somehow becoming the basis for the criminal charges.
