Romanian court says conditional release for former minister Elena Udrea is possible

The Ploiești Court found on Tuesday, July 1, that former tourism minister and influential politician Elena Udrea can be conditionally released from prison. The decision is not final and has reportedly been contested by the National Anticorruption Directorate, or DNA.

Udrea is currently hospitalized at the Ploiești County Emergency Hospital, after undergoing surgery on Sunday, June 29, following a diagnosis of acute lithiasic cholecystitis, essentially a gallbladder inflammation, according to Agerpres.

Elena Udrea was sent to trial in 2015 and was definitively convicted in June 2018, but she left the country before the sentence was pronounced, being located and incarcerated in Costa Rica.

Later, in December 2018, the Constitutional Court ruled that the law had not been respected when the five-judge panels at the High Court were constituted. As a result, the convictions in the “Gala Bute” case were suspended, Udrea was released from custody in Costa Rica, and she returned to Romania.

In April 2022, based on a decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union, the High Court rejected an annulment appeal filed by Elena Udrea and confirmed the six-year prison sentence. She fled to Bulgaria, but was caught and brought back to the country, being incarcerated in June 2022.

At the end of May of this year, the Prahova Tribunal accepted Udrea’s request for sentence reduction and ordered the deduction of a cumulative period of about eight months from the six-year prison sentence she received in the “Gala Bute” case. Last week, a prison commission decided that she can be conditionally released.

The case shows how Elena Udrea coordinated a system through which people close to her received, with her knowledge, sums of money from representatives of companies in exchange for guaranteeing timely payments for works financed by the Ministry of Tourism, which she led.

Investigators said the money obtained either entered Elena Udrea’s personal assets (in cash or through payment for goods and services), or those of the Bucharest Organization of the PDL (Democratic Liberal Party), or of the former head of the Romanian Boxing Federation, Rudel Obreja.

Udrea is also accused of instructing officials in the Ministry of Tourism to violate their duties during the procurement of advertising services for the gala where Lucian Bute boxed. The damage attributed to Elena Udrea amounts to EUR 3 million.