EU country’s officials caught in stolen car – media
UPDATE: The Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization has contacted RT to state that Minister Sebastian-Ioan Burduja was not present in the car mentioned in the article.
A Romanian government delegation headed to Moldova on an official visit had one of its cars confiscated, after a border check revealed it had been reported stolen in Italy over a decade ago, according to local media. Its current owner is the very agency in charge of overseeing the integration of national databases with the EU and international ones.
The car, whose make and model were not specified, is registered to the Romanian Digitalization Authority (ADR) and was one of the vehicles used by Research, Innovation and Digitization Minister Sebastian-Ioan Burduja’s delegation for a trip to Chisinau this week. The ministry stressed to RT in a letter that the minister “traveled by plane and in a car provided by the Moldovan government,” while the “persons traveling in the car were only representatives from ADR, part of a Romanian delegation on an official visit to Chisinau.”
Moldovan border guards checked the Interpol database and saw that the car had been reported stolen in Italy in 2010, according to the Hungarian news agency MTI citing a Romanian news outlet. ADR head Dragos Cristian-Vlad was allowed to enter Moldova, pending consultations with the Romanian embassy in Chisinau. He was later told to hand over the car to the Moldovan authorities on his way out of the country.
Romanian records showed that the vehicle had changed hands several times between 2010 and 2017, when the government seized it as part of a tax judgment against its then-owner. The Romanian tax authority then gave it to the Ministry of Telecommunications, which soon became the Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications Infrastructure. In 2020, the ministry assigned it to the ADR, which operates under its wing.
Cristian-Vlad told local media outlets that such an embarrassing incident could have been avoided by connecting various databases of EU member countries, but it’s his ADR that is in charge of setting the technical and legal conditions for database interoperability.
Moldova is a former Soviet republic located between Ukraine to the east and Romania, which joined the EU in 2007, to the west. Its residents overwhelmingly speak Romanian.
