Donations
Veridica.md
Igor Dodon is undoubtedly the product of the profiteering political class of the Republic of Moldova. Tutored by the former Communist President Vladimir Voronin and the fugitive oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc, Dodon has been described as a prototype of the duality of the Moldovan politician, interested only in making lots of money and capable of any kind of internal or external political betrayal. Detained for corruption and treason, Dodon is now complaining that he is the victim of political persecution.
Energy schemes and arrangements over the Naslavcea dam and the Giurgulesti port
The charges against Dodon in the four counts are the quintessence of his political activity over the past 20 years or so.
Prosecutors are accusing him of passive corruption, illicit enrichment, getting funding for his party from an organized criminal group and, last but not least, treason. Throughout his political career, Dodon has amassed a considerable fortune, estimated by prosecutors solely on the basis of his visible assets at 4-5 million euros. Law enforcement officials cannot yet estimate the value of the other assets that are reasonably suspected to be de facto owned by Dodon, or the businesses run in Russia by his brother, Alexander Dodon.
Igor Dodon started his political career in the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova (PCRM), led by Vladimir Voronin. He rose relatively quickly in the ranks of both the party and the Ministry of Economy, where he was active since the mid-2000s. The first suspicions of corruption in connection with the exports to the Russian Federation, of meat in particular, emerged during that period. Russia had imposed its first embargo on Moldovan products after the then-President Vladimir Voronin had tried to get closer to the EU. Dodon was accused of favoring a number of companies to export meat, wine and other products subject to the Russian embargo on a preferential basis.
The first resounding but onerous business involving Dodon became known in May 2008: a scheme to supply electricity from Ukraine through an obscure shell-company - Energo-Partner ”Kft - from Hungary which would inflate the price by about 29%. Thus, the damage born by the state was 14.5 million dollars. Dodon was then Minister of Economy and had been sent to negotiate the deal by Prime Minister Zinaida Greceanii. The minute details of the business were included in the WikiLeaks cablegrams.
According to the former Prime Minister Vlad Filat, that was the moment when Igor Dodon was “convinced” by Ukrainians to prepare the file by means of which the Republic of Moldova ceded its half of the Naslavcea dam on the Dniester River, in northern Moldova. Until then, the dam had been jointly owned by the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine. Dodon prepared the documentation and Filat – meanwhile the Communists had lost power in Chisinau – signed the handover agreement with the then Ukrainian Prime Minister Iulia Timoshenko. The prosecutors constantly protected Dodon from this case, during both Plahotniuc’s rule and that of the Socialists between 2019 and 2021. Prosecutors have now reopened the case for passive corruption.
Similarly, Dodon was involved in the drawing up of the documentation for the 99-year lease of another vitally strategic site – the Port of Giurgiulesti, Moldova’s only indirect exit to the sea – to an Azerbaijani company. That caused the Republic of Moldova 15 years worth of damage, as shown by an investigation carried out by the Anticorupție.md portal.
The parents helped him with the three-story luxury villa
With the takeover of the leadership of the Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova (PSRM) in 2011, after ‘stabbing’ his former mentor Vladimir Voronin in the back and leaving, together with some communist deputies, to join the Party of Socialists, Igor Dodon built for himself a three-story luxury villa in Chisinau. Before the construction was complete, he denied it was his property, but later the villa appeared in his wealth statement. An interesting episode took place before the presidential election when Dodon admitted that he had built that villa thanks to a preferential loan 3-4 times lower than the market average granted by the Victoria Bank, a bank led at the time by the now fugitive oligarch Vlad Plahotniuc. Moreover, when asked how he managed to build a house worth hundreds of thousands of euros from the salary of a civil servant, Igor Dodon answered calmly that his parents helped him.
The villa in question is the one searched last week by anti-corruption prosecutors and from where tens of thousands of euros and about 700,000 Moldovan lei [35,000 euros] in “cash” were seized. Ironically, on an envelope found by prosecutors it was written “for PSRM”, and about 17,000 euros and 1,000 dollars were found inside the envelope.
Dodon was also revealed as a big fan of luxury vacations in exotic places such as Mauritius, Seychelles or Dubai. Such vacations can cost tens of thousands of euros. The Socialist leader spent one of his luxury holidays in Greece in a resort owned by Igor Ceaika, the son of former Russian Attorney General Yuri Ceaika, with whom he later went into business, using his brother Alexandru Dodon as a cover. Also, Dodon lobbied for Ceaika to get into cryptocurrency combinations in Transnistria.
The “kuliok” case
It's no secret that Igor Dodon was Moscow's agent, who relied on him for about a decade. A keen connoisseur of the “gentle calf” getting milk from two mothers tactic, Igor Dodon served both Russia and oligarch Vlad Plahotniuc internally as a “straw opposition” in parliament when the Democratic Party came to power either as part of the Alliance for European Integration (AIE), or its own, from autumn 2015 to June 2019.
On the one hand, Dodon was asking for money from Moscow to finance the party and protect the Russian interests in the Republic of Moldova, and on the other hand, Plahotniuc was buying his political peace from the same Dodon through salaries. As he had previously done with Voronin, Dodon “betrayed” his former silent financier, Vlad Plahotniuc, at the right time, when he surfed the wave of the January 2019 elections and made that “impossible alliance” with the Action and Solidarity Party (PAS) led by Maia Sandu.
Although Plahotniuc's departure was decided jointly by the US, the EU and Russia, Dodon has always tried to take credit himself for this high-level consensus. Plahotniuc swore revenge and threw several turkeys in the presidential yard, in the Russian mafia-style. One week before the fall of the de facto government led by Plahotniuc, a footage was leaked showing Plahotniuc handing Igor Dodon a black bag, and based on the conversation they had, it could be assumed that was the money that he would get on a weekly basis.
Dodon does not deny receiving those sums regularly, but asks Plahotniuc not to give them to him personally, but to “Costea”, according to the established “protocol”. As prosecutors later accused Plahotniuc of forming an organized criminal group, the weekly bribe turned in the eyes of law enforcement officers into Dodon's second indictment - funding his party with money provided by an organized criminal group. Dodon has always denied the allegations, saying the video was a fake.
Kremlinovich and the Russian subsidies
The “kuliok” episode also revealed that Dodon would regularly receive money from Gazprom to finance the party. Therefore, PSRM was subsidized by the Russians.
Earlier, in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Dodon had been unveiled as the main beneficiary of the Bahamas business in which an offshore from that country - Westerby Limited - connected to a Russian MP, had sent him about 1.5 million euros in funding. Through a scheme that involved the company of the Socialist deputy and his childhood friend, Corneliu Furculiță, his close friends from PSRM, but also a series of fictitious loans, Dodon campaigned on Russian money.
Igor Dodon had prepared the ground to get more money from Moscow again, this time for the 2020 presidential campaign. A document published by BILD, after Dodon lost the presidential elections and was abandoned by Moscow as first guardian of its interests in Chisinau, shows that he had issued the Russians an ‘invoice’ worth 11.5 million Euro for the preparation of the election campaign.
Moreover, journalists from RISE Moldova have also revealed how the Russians, including through people connected to the FSB, got involved in the 2020 presidential elections. Dodon had a direct connection to the “Moldovan branch” at the Kremlin, where the SVR Colonel Igor Maslov was chief, through a dedicated line. This was Dodon’s contact person in Chisinau.
Dodon’s political career is over, but his issues with the law have just begun
These are just a few of the major episodes that prosecutors are investigating in connection with Igor Dodon, but his acts of corruption and serving Russian interests are much more numerous and have only been reported now and then by the investigative press in the Republic of Moldova. Dodon accused the head of state, Maia Sandu of making up cases at her will, to which she simply replied that “if he was innocent, then he had nothing to worry about”. Prosecutors say they have irrefutable evidence on all counts, but probably the easiest for them to prove will be the charge of illicit enrichment.
Due to its significance, the Dodon case is an essential signal for the reform of the judiciary, both for the prosecutors and for the panels that will deliberate on these charges. It remains to be seen whether a balance will be struck between the political will to reform and a minimum internal desire of the judiciary for change. As for Dodon, his political career is over. With less and less support from the electorate, the former president cannot even rely on the fact that a popular uprising would save him.
