Former Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase shot himself in the neck with a 9mm pistol when two police officers came to his home to serve him a warrant for his arrest, in order to serve his two-year prison sentence for corruption. Mediafax agency reports that Nastase asked the policemen who came to pick him up to let him take some books, left the room and seconds later shot himself. He was immediately taken to the hospital, he has several gunshot wounds to the neck, but his condition is not critical.
FAST INTERVENTION: Adrijan Nastase in the ambulance
"I hope he will recover", current Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta told reporters after visiting his wounded predecessor and, according to some reports, a political protégé in the hospital.
Socialist Adrian Nastase (61), prime minister from 2000 to 2004, is the second ex-prime minister of Romania to go to prison, after the communist Constantin Dascalescu, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1991 for murder committed during the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.
The Romanian case of the trial of top politicians for corruption is not unique. In the 1990s, Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi was sentenced to 27 years in prison for corruption and illegal financing of his own party, which was reduced to nine years and eight months by a higher court. He fled to Tunisia, where he died in exile in 2000.
The former Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader is also being investigated for corruption.
Ponta completed his doctorate while he was a minister in Nastase's cabinet. The scientific journal Nature recently accused Ponta of plagiarism in his law doctoral thesis, for which the mentor was Nastase, who is also a law professor. Reporters explain the emergency visit as a sign that their closeness has not been disturbed by the trials that befell the former prime minister.
The Supreme Court of Romania sentenced Nastase to two years in prison for corruption. In doing so, he confirmed the previous court decision that Nastase appealed on March 30, according to which he is responsible for illegally collecting money for his presidential campaign.
As AFP reports, Romanian prosecutors claim that companies and state agencies were forced to pay a fee to attend a conference in 2004, and that the money was then used for Nastase's failed presidential campaign that year. Nastase faces new trials after prosecutors appealed previous court decisions. In December, he was suspected of giving his wife a suspicious amount of 400.000 euros as an inheritance. The prosecutors accuse him of having received 630.000 euros as a bribe from the owner of a construction company, in order to appoint the director of that company as the head of the construction inspectorate.
Unnamed diplomats in Bucharest told an AFP correspondent that the verdict against Nastase marks an important turning point for the independence and integrity of the Romanian judiciary.
Nastase claimed that the case was politically motivated, and his lawyer, Lucian Bolkas, told TV Realitatea that his client planned to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The Romanian judicial system has been under strong monitoring by the European Commission since 2007, when Brussels insisted that more attention be paid to the fight against corruption at the highest level.
