Romania’s High Court scraps three-year sentence given to former minister

The five-judge panel of Romania's High Court admitted the appeal filed by former Senator of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) Dan Sova and scrapped the final three-year prison sentence for influence peddling. The decision is final, according to local Ziare.com.

The High Court has considered Sova’s appeal after the Constitutional Court confirmed as unconstitutional the five-judge panels because not all of their members were appointed randomly (one of them was appointed by default).

The High Court scrapped only Sova’s sentence and set a deadline for re-appraising the case concerning the others indicted in the file for April 15. In a similar case involving former energy minister Constantin Nita, the court postponed the decision for February 25.

The Constitutional Court admitted in November 2018 that five-judge panels were illegally composed. As a result, all ongoing trials handled by five-judge panels at the High Court were stopped and new panels were drawn. At the same time, people who had received final convictions from such panels and still had the possibility to challenge them could do so and ask for retrials. Former energy minister Constantin Nita and the former president of the Romanian Boxing Federation, Rudel Obreja, were two of the beneficiaries.

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