Mayor, former interior minister join the lists of Romanian officials who’ve lost their PhD titles this year

Romanian education minister Mircea Dumitru signed on Wednesday the orders on withdrawing the PhD titles of former interior minister Petre Toba and Voluntari mayor Florentin Pandele, Bucharest mayor Gabriela Firea’s husband. On October 12, the National Council for Attesting University Titles, Diplomas, and Certificates (CNATDCU) decided with 36 favorable votes and one negative vote that Toba and Pandele had plagiarized their doctorate theses and asked for the removal of their PhD titles. At the beginning of September, CNATDCU rejected the analysis report of the first special commission in the case of Pandele and Toba’s doctoral theses, and decided to appoint a new commission. The first group of experts concluded that the two authors hadn’t plagiarized. CNATDCU is a consultative body at national level, made up of 35 special commissions. The PhD thesis published by Petre Toba was called “The Romanian Police - Force of stability and security. Optimizing the management of international cooperation in combating unconventional threats.” According to information published by local media, Toba copied over 250 of the 390 pages of his thesis from various works. Petre Toba has submitted a complaint to the General Prosecution against the members of the General Council of CNATDCU who voted for setting up a new technical commission to analyze his thesis. This commission found that the plagiarism of Toba was “massive”. In the case of Florentin Pandele, the mayor of the Voluntari, the official investigation about his doctoral thesis began following an analysis made by the Romanian publication PressOne, which showed in an article from May this year that the Voluntari mayor copied more than a third of his work from other sources. Pandele’s thesis, published at the National University of Defense in 2008, was called “Romania and the new challenges posed by European integration”. This brought Pandele his second PhD title after the one earned in 2007 from the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” Police Academy. Similar to the case of Toba, the first commission analyzing the doctoral thesis of Pandele rejected the plagiarism accusation. However, the General Council of CNATDCU rejected the report, setting up a new commission that found that it was, indeed, plagiarism. Although Romania recorded other notorious plagiarism cases in the previous years, the plagiarism scandal exploded in 2016. At the end of June this year, CNATDCU announced that it was analyzing ten plagiarism cases, including those of the former deputy prime minister Gabriel Oprea, interior minister Petre Toba, and mayors Florentin Pandele and Robert Negoita. At the beginning of July, nine owners of PhD titles from the “Mihai Viteazul” Information Academy asked for the removal of their PhD titles, including former ministers Radu Stroe and Mihai Stanisoara, as well as deputy General Prosecutor Bogdan Licu. A few days later, at the end of July, Gabriel Oprea was stripped of his PhD title. In October 2016, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) majority in the Senate passed a law that allows people to freely ask for the removal of their PhD titles, without being held responsible for intellectual fraud. According to the new law, the PhD titles are granted and removed by universities, not by the Education Ministry. Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos challenged the law and the Constitutional Court ruled it was unconstitutional. Romanian MP reignites media scandal about alleged plagiarism by chief anti-graft prosecutor Former Romanian Prime Minister loses doctor degree due to plagiarism