Court orders second jail sentence without parole for former Romanian PM Nastase

Former Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase got a second jail conviction on Monday afternoon (January 6), when the court ordered four years in jail without parole for continued bribery. He also got three years in jail for blackmail. By Romanian law, he will serve the biggest of the sentences. The former PM had appealed the court order from March 2013, when he got three years in jail with parole. The court however upped his sentence. His wife Dana Nastase also got a three year jail sentence without parole, for complicity to bribery, with an eight year trial period. During this period, she will be under supervision, and should she commit other crimes, she will have to serve time for both the old and new crimes. The court also decided to confiscate RON 1.8 million – or some EUR 0.4 million – from the Nastase family. Nastase was released from jail in March 2013, after serving eight months in a different case, under the code name “Quality Trophy”, after receiving the sentence in June 2012. The new conviction came within a case called Zambaccian, in which Nastase was found to have taken bribes worth some EUR 630,000 between 2002 and 2004 when he was serving as Prime Minister. He took the bribes via his wife Dana, and they consisted in goods imported from China, as well as construction work services at the family's homes in Bucharest and Cornu. The name of the file came from the name of the street in Bucharest where the Nastase family lives. Irina Paula Jianu, the former head of the State Inspectorate in Constructions, who now serves jail time from the Quality Trophy case, got another jail sentence, of four years. In the Quality Trophy case, Nastase and Jianu were convicted for illegal fund-raising for the 2004 electoral campaign. editor@romania-insider.com