Row over corruption ruling grows

A ROMANIAN cabinet minister resigned yesterday, testing the stability of the month-old leftist-led government after 250 000 people came out in protest over a decree that could effectively grant amnesty to dozens of officials accused of corruption.

The government order, hastily adopted late on Tuesday, has triggered the biggest nationwide protests since the fall of communism in 1989.

Critics say decriminalising a number of graft offences marks the most significant retreat on anti-corruption reforms since Romania joined the European Union in 2007.

Romania’s minister of business, trade and entrepreneurship, Florin Jianu, said on Facebook he was resigning.

It was the ethical thing to do, he said, “not for my professional honesty, my conscience is clean on that front, but for my child”.

“How am I going to look him in the eye and what am I going to tell him over the years?” he wrote.

“Am I going to tell him his father was a coward and supported actions he does not believe in, or that he chose to walk away from a story that isn’t his?”

Prime Minister Sorin Grindeanu has shown no sign of giving ground, but a vice-president of the ruling Social Democrat Party (PSD), Mihai Chirica, urged the government to withdraw the decree.

President Klaus Iohannis, a former leader of the opposition centre-right Liberal Party, followed Romania’s top judicial watchdog in filing a legal challenge to the decree with the constitutional court.

The decree is due to take effect in a little over a week.

The government says the order, and a draft bill on jail pardons, are needed to ease prison overcrowding and bring the criminal code into line with recent constitutional court rulings.

Critics say it is tailor-made to benefit dozens of public officials under investigation or on trial for corruption, including PSD leader Liviu Dragnea.