Moldova Revises the Competition Regulations for the Prosecutor General Post

The list of new rules on the election of the head of the Prosecutor General’s Office includes a paragraph that regulates the actions in case the situation that occurred during the previous election repeats during the selection of the Prosecutor General. All scorecards of those SCP members who are unable to justify their scores will be cancelled. “If a member of the Superior Council of Prosecutors is unable to argue the scores given for one or more of the criteria stipulated by law and the current Regulations, the Council will decide by an absolute majority to exclude all the forms filled in by the aforementioned prosecutor, with a reconsideration of the final score of the candidates,” reads the draft amendment to the Regulations on the organization and conduct of the competition to elect a candidate for the post of Prosecutor General. According to the Justice Minister, the document should be approved no later than next week. “Several technical amendments have been made to the regulation, including to prevent situations that could disrupt competition, as well as to ensure its fairness and transparency. In the near future - this week, at the latest next week - this regulation will be discussed at the meeting of the Superior Council of Prosecutors,” Justice Minister Veronica Mihailov-Moraru said. The Superior Council of Prosecutors announced a competition to select a candidate for the post of Prosecutor General last autumn. Final interviews were held in February. However, a few days after the interviews with the candidates, the results were denied and the contest itself was cancelled. This happened due to the fact that Olesea Virlan, who was then a member of the SCP, gave one of the applicants an unreasonably low score, and the regulations did not stipulate what to do in such situations. Five days after the prosecutors’ decision to cancel the contest, Olesea Virlan voluntarily resigned. Shortly before this decision, on the air of the Cutia Negra programme on TV8, the president of the Superior Council of Prosecutors, Dumitru Obada, recommended Olesea Virlan to resign and said that otherwise he was ready to do so. The post of Prosecutor General became vacant after the previous Prosecutor General, Alexandru Stoianoglo, received an unsatisfactory assessment from a special commission of the SCP and was dismissed by presidential decree. The Prosecutor General’s Office has been headed by interim chairs for the last two years - the first was Dumitru Robu, now Ion Muteanu is the head of the Prosecutor General’s Office.