PREMIER NAMES EX-PRESIDENT “POLITICAL MUTTON-HEAD”
12.03.2010
“Voronin is a political muttonhead, to whom I say bye-bye Voronin”. That was how Moldovan Prime Minister Vlad Filat commented the accusations the ex-president of Moldova made yesterday that the premier allegedly continues his old business – major smuggling of cigarettes to Romania.
On Thursday, Moldovan Communist Party Chairman MP Vladimir Voronin gave a big a news conference, during which he was requested inter alia to comment the media stories that the AEI members had allegedly forced Prime Minister Vlad Filat into deciding concerning the new Constitution by blackmailing Filat with the huge consignment of contraband cigarettes from Moldova revealed last March 5 by the Romanian customs.
Voronin said, “I know Filat was summoned to Bucharest recently, where billionaire Dinu Patricio reminded him it was high time Filat had returned the money given to him for elections. Maybe, Filat recollected the cigarette business he used to run in his younger years, and decided to resort to cigarette smuggling once again”.
Vladimir Voronin stated that according to the information available with him, the cigarette smuggling operation was to engage 10 heavy-duty trucks, but only 2 or three worked off successfully. According to the documents made public by the Romanian customs, the trucks were carrying metal items from Ukraine over to Bulgaria or Turkey, but changed their cargo in Moldova, and continued their route already with Moldovan cigarettes.
“I am not ruling out completely that an accord, reached previously at the top level between Romanian President Traian Basescu and Dinu Patricio, might fail. Maybe, they failed to strike a bargain at the last moment, and decided to punish somebody”, said Vladimir Voronin, who believes Filat may well have fallen victim of blackmail, though Voronin has never heard Vlad Filat demanding an early parliamentary election.
So far, neither the Moldovan customs, which strangely failed to notice 700 thousand packages of contraband cigarettes worth some €380,000 despite all their sophisticated European equipment, nor the Tutun-Tutun-CTC factory of Chisinau, the cigarette manufacturer, have commented the scandal yet.
However, the Moldovan Prosecutor General's Office has already ordered to revoke from the Customs Service all the materials concerning the huge cigarette smuggling case. The Office explained in its press release today that “for the purpose of ensuring a prompter, fuller and more objective investigation of this case”, this work shall be entrusted to best prosecutors from the Office itself.
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