An appeals court in Bucharest has ordered the termination of a criminal case against businessman and former Blue Air (Romania) (BLA, Bucharest Henri Coanda) owner Nelu Iordache, cancelling a 12-and-a-half-year prison sentence he was given for alleged embezzlement at the airline, the Romanian news agency Agerpres reported.
Iordache was arrested and charged with embezzlement in April 2013, linked to an attempt to sell the then loss-making carrier; to “tax evasion in a continuous form”; and to his allegedly adding fictitious purchases of advertising materials in the accounts. Romania’s anticorruption watchdog (Direcția Națională Anticorupție - DNA) sent the case to court in June 2018, and the entrepreneur received his sentence in March 2021.
However, in their ruling this week, judges at the Bucharest Court of Appeal maintained that the facts through which Iordache was accused had expired, pointing to a decision (no. 358/2022) taken at the Constitutional Court of Romania last May. That decision declared as unconstitutional, an article in the criminal code that allowed prosecutors to interrupt ongoing cases by administering new evidence, a regulation that will benefit thousands of defendants besides Iordache.
In the Blue Air case, the magistrates also decided to terminate a criminal process regarding Ali Imad, a former company administrator, who had been handed a seven-year sentence for complicity in tax evasion.
Nevertheless, the judges admitted, in part, a civil action lawsuit that the Romanian tax authority (Agenția Națională de Administrare Fiscală - ANAF) had filed, obliging Iordache, Imad, and Iordache’s Blue Air parent entity Bata Sky Imobiliare (formerly Blue Air Transport Aerian) to repay a total of RON8,972,252 lei (USD2 million) in illegally deducted VAT.
Nicknamed the King of Asphalt in some local media, Nelu Iordache is currently in prison serving a final sentence of 11 years and nine months in a separate case related to fraud with European funds allocated for the construction of a road between the towns of Arad and Nădlac in western Romania.
