COURT LEAVES IN FORCE RENATO USATII ARREST WARRANT

The Sectorul Ciocana Court of Chisinau has left in force the warrant, issued earlier for the arrest of Renato Usatii, the Chairman of the strongly opposition organization called Partidul Nostru [Our Party, OP].

Usatii’s lawyer Anatol Istrate stated to journalists that he had provided Judge Sergiu Bularu with numerous evidences proving that the arrest of Renato Usatii and the very criminal litigation initiated against him are absolutely unlawful.

“But our evidences, documents and arguments seem to be not interesting to the Court, whose decision we regard as unlawful. It is clear as day that there is no and can be no fair judiciary for Renato Usatii in the present-day Moldova”, said the lawyer.

Istrate also said that the defense side has not been given the verdict’s motivation part, “Therefore I have no even the slightest idea about what Judge Bularu had on his mind at taking the decision”.

Infotag’s dossier: Born in Falesti town in 1978, Renato Usatii graduated from the foreign languages department of Balti State University, worked at the Chisinau Airport, and then as a public catering engineer at the National Railroad Company of Moldova (CFM). Since 2005, Usatii has been heading the Russian corporation of ZAO VPT-NN (in Nizhniy Novgorod city) that specializes in the production of heavy equipment based on the usage of hard-alloy materials, as well as in trading motor vehicles, computers, household equipment, production of automobile parts etc.

Beginning from mid-2016, a number of criminal cases have been started against Renato Usatii in Moldova, the key of them being the one on Usatii’s alleged involvement in the attempted assassination of fugitive Russian banker and financier Gherman Gorbuntsov, who has received the status of a refugee in Great Britain. Since August 2016, Renato Usatii has been in Moscow, hiding from what he calls “the Plahotniuc justice in Moldova”.

Usatii rejects all accusations as unfounded, naming them political persecution by the ruling regime, “which is doing its utmost to throw a strong rival away from the country’s political life”. The murder of banker German Gorbuntsov was attempted in London in March 2012. British investigators established later on that the unlucky killer was Moldova citizen Vitalie Proca, now serving a sentence in Romania for murders attempted in Bucharest and London.