Romania’s Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) has detained former presidential candidate Călin Georgescu, Digi24 reports. According to the outlet’s sources, law enforcement officers detained the politician on the road and took him to his home in the town of Mogoșoaia outside Bucharest in order to carry out a search in his presence.
In a press release issued on Sept. 21, DIICOT stated that the directorate’s prosecutors are conducting searches in a case involving fraud with particularly serious consequences and the formation of an organized criminal group. The searches are taking place at five addresses in Bucharest, Mogoșoaia, Ciolpani, and Buftea.
According to investigators, two Romanians and an Italian national formed an organized criminal group in September 2021 with the aim of defrauding businesspeople. DIICOT does not name the suspects, noting only that the criminal organization was headed by a 64-year-old Romanian national (Călin Georgescu is 64). The group’s leader allegedly introduced his two accomplices as “successful businessmen and executives of foreign companies who supposedly had large sums of money available to lend to entrepreneurs looking to expand their business in Romania, on condition that a cash deposit was put up.”
According to the case file, the perpetrators convinced one businessman to transfer them €1.1 million, promising to arrange a large loan from a foreign bank.
Georgescu has previously faced investigations on other charges, including spreading false information, forming an antisemitic organization, and attempting to undermine the constitutional order.
Georgescu, a right-wing populist, ran as an independent candidate in Romania’s presidential election in November 2024, taking first place in the first round vote with 23% overall support. However, the country’s Constitutional Court annulled the results and ordered a new vote based on suspicions of Russian interference in the election, as Romania’s intelligence services published documents indicating that around 25,000 bot accounts on TikTok may have campaigned in Georgescu’s favor. The politician himself denied any connection to Russia.
This September, the Romanian outlet Snoop, working together with The Insider and several Eastern European publications, found that the AdNow advertising network collects data on millions of users in Romania and transmits it to servers in Novosibirsk, Russia. In late May, IAB Europe revoked AdNow’s right to place ads through its centralized real-time bidding system. AdNow ads nevertheless continue to be distributed through undeclared servers. Snoop had previously reported that money from this kind of Russian advertising activity was going to websites that promoted far-right candidate Georgescu and the AUR party.
