Romania’s Chamber of Deputies adopted on November 11 the law that establishes a new state agency that will manage and harness the assets seized from people convicted for corruption and other economic offenses.

The Chamber of Deputies approved the law after the Senate initially voted against the project, one month ago.

The new National Agency for Managing Seized Goods would mainly focus on recovering the damages the state has taken from corruption offenses, by harnessing the assets seized by the anticorruption prosecutors during their investigations. The agency can start selling the assets once the courts rule final sentences against people guilty of corruption and hold them to pay back the damages.

This new agency has been created after the National Anticorruption Directorate’s chief prosecutor Laura Codruta Kovesi complained that the tax authority ANAF did a poor job in recovering the damages in corruption cases.

editor@romania-insider.com