Moldova’s underequipped and understaffed Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office is struggling to file documents because it doesn’t have enough printing paper, its head, Veronica Dragalin, has said.
“We need a lot of paper this month to send cases to court. This is a real problem. We simply can’t send a case with 40 volumes because the paper has run out,” Dragalin said at a legal forum on Friday, as quoted by news website Infotag.
“And we have to waste time by contacting the Prosecutor General’s Office with a request to provide [more] paper.”
Dragalin complained that, despite the anti-corruption legislation passed in 2016, her office does not have all the necessary resources.
“For example, under the law, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office must have its own budget, its own office, its own website. But we don’t have any of this,” Dragalin stated.
“If we want results, we need necessary tools. We need officers capable of wiretapping and surveillance,” she added.
A former senior official at the US Attorney’s Office in California, Dragalin was appointed as Moldova’s lead corruption investigator in June. During her first press conference in August, she said her agency does not have enough prosecutors to handle the large backlog of cases.