11 years have passed since the former administrator of Comcereal Bihor, Petru Ţiţ Andreescu, was picked up by the policemen of the Economic Crimes Investigation Service for an extremely serious accusation. Together with three colleagues, the man was accused of making 5,000 tons of wheat disappear from the state reserve and of compromising another 5,000 tons, causing damage of more than 3 million euros.
Sent to court in 2016, for embezzlement, fraud, falsification of documents and negligence in service, the file has not been resolved even to this day, after almost 8 years! Time in which the criminal liability for the imputed crimes has expired…
Guardians of the state
Petru Ţiţ Andreescu is the main shareholder and administrator of Comcereal SA Bihor, which is now in bankruptcy proceedings. The company is, in fact, the former Enterprise for the Valorization of Cereals and Technical Plants Bihor, which became after 1989 Regia Autonomă Romcereal RA Bucharest – Bihor Branch, and since 1996 a joint-stock company.
In 2000, the company got its hands on a monetary contract. The National Administration of State Reserves and Special Issues (ANRSPS) entrusted him with the preservation of 38,000 tons of wheat from the so-called state safety reserve for the protection of the population and the economy in case of calamity or war. The stock was established in the period 2000-2007, Comcereal Bihor collecting monthly 150,000 lei for storage and maintenance in three reception bases: Marghita, Tinca and Batăr.
A secure and lucrative contract, which Ţiţ Andreescu took full advantage of because, instead of supervising the state reserve, he made it disappear…
Attention, it is stolen!
The case ended up in the investigation of the Prosecutor’s Office attached to the Oradea Court of Appeal, which discovered that, between 2000 and 2012, wheat was systematically stolen from the Comcereal silos. The damage was enormous, over 3 million euros: more than 5,000 tons of wheat were left to perish in Batăr and Tinca, and another 5,000 tons, i.e. almost 250 TIRs, disappeared from the Marghita Base.
The wheat had been secretly transported to various companies and to a mill, being sold illegally, the investigators discovered, who suspected that Ţiţ Andreescu wanted to frame the merchant: he sold the state reserve wheat, which was of superior quality, at a good price, and wanted to “cover” the hole by buying poor quality wheat instead. It’s just that he kept postponing, the price of grain kept rising and he couldn’t replace the stolen part…
As if that was not enough, the administrator also tried to “pinch” the rent that the state was paying for storing the grain. Using false documents, the head of Comcereal Bihor declared larger than the actual dimensions of the storage spaces in Baza Marghita, a trick by which his company collected an additional 1.7 million lei during the 12 years of the contract with State Reserves.
“Boyers” at trial
During the investigations, which began in 2013, the investigators detained for 24 hours Petru Ţiţ Andreescu, Maria Tătar, the head of the Marghita Base, from where the wheat had disappeared, and two engineers, Kiraly Iosif and Leonica Furtos, involved in the harvesting documentation regarding the size of the storage spaces.
Three years later, in 2016, they were all sent to court, and the properties of Comcereal Bihor, Ţiţ Andreescu and Maria Tătar were seized. The wealth of the director was not to be dismissed at all, because while he was at the helm of Comcereal Bihor, Petru Ţiţ Andreescu became a real nobleman, buying over 200 properties – land and buildings, as can be seen from the documents in the file, studied by Bihor.
Guilty: the investigators
The process of theft from the state reserve has not ended even today, although almost 8 years have passed since the first debates, during which time one of the defendants – the head of the Marghita Base, Maria Tătar – died. The trial began on March 3, 2017 at the Bihor Court, where the case remained until February 2, 2023, i.e. 6 years, of which one year was postponed from one month to another just for the pronouncement of the verdict!
The sentence pronounced by judge Georgeta Ciungan and spread over more than 540 pages freed the defendants from criminal liability, both because there is not enough evidence that they committed the acts, and because, meanwhile, in the 6 years that have passed since the beginning of the debates , the prescription intervened.
Who is to blame? Obviously, not the court where the trial was delayed, but the prosecutors, who would have made a mistake in the legal framing of the facts and made an incomplete investigation, because they did not provide evidence, not even tangentially regarding the defendants’ incomes, to see if they could justify them and nor “for the identification of the commercial companies where the wheat would have been used”.
“These evidences were no longer possible to be administered during the trial, given the extremely long period since the consummation of the act of embezzlement. Instead, the prosecution would have had this possibility, given the starting moment of the criminal investigation, closer to the date of the act and the resources it benefits from, infinitely higher than those available to the court”, reads the sentence.
Shared guilt
In the judge’s opinion, if they are not proven, the perpetrators cannot be made to pay, so she also rejected the state representatives’ request that the defendants pay for the damage caused by the disappearance of the wheat from the Marghita silo.
As for the illegal rent surplus and the damage caused to the state by the destruction of the wheat in the silos in Batăr and Tinca, the court left the state’s civil action unresolved, through ANRSPS. In Romanian, after more than 6 years of trial, the state must start another process to recover the damage.
On hold
The judge did not leave unsanctioned the lack of interest with which ANRSPS representatives supervised the state’s wheat, reproaching them that the inspectors did it “on their knees”, from the office. “The internal norms had the role of ensuring the fulfillment of the obligations, given the object, in this case, the preservation of the state reserve wheat, of strategic importance for the Romanian state and for the citizens of this country”, drew the judge’s attention, pointing out that at the silos in Bihor, made only formal checks by ANRSPS representatives who, thus, were complicit in the irregularities.
As expected, the Prosecutor’s Office attached to the Oradea Court of Appeal considered that the complaints were not well-founded, and therefore attacked the solution. The debates resumed in March 2023 at the Oradea Court of Appeal, by the panel of judges, formed by Ovidiu Musta and Nicolae Todoruţ who entered the deliberations this fall. But there they remained, postponing no less than 15 times the pronouncement of a final verdict, the last time just two weeks ago. If the story is still a decade old and the perpetrators are not criminally responsible, why would the judges be in a hurry?
OTHERS ARE SHOOTING
The thief from Sălaj, under control in Bihor
While the Comcereal barns were ravaged by thieves and rodents, the inspectors of the National Administration of State Reserves reported to Bucharest that the wheat was kept “in appropriate parameters”.
The investigators established that the inventory reports were drawn up “from the pen”, without a field check, and the quality analyzes were not done at an independent laboratory, but also at the Comcereal headquarters. However, the perpetrators were not held accountable, the investigation regarding the officials’ negligence being closed, as shown in the judgment of the Bihor Court.
One of the signatories of the reports was Viorel Teglaş from Sălăj, expert and manager of material stocks from the Territorial Unit 95 Var of ANRSPS, based in Jibou (Sălaj county), who was imprisoned, but for another feat. In 2015, he was definitively sentenced to 10 years and 6 months in prison for acts similar to those of which Ţiţ is accused, having been caught having sold 372 tons of copper from the state reserve, worth 10.9 million lei, damage that the courts court charged him in full.
Articles on the same topic:
