Moldova's former prime minister was handcuffed inside its own parliament
On October 15, 2015, Moldovan lawmakers stripped Vlad Filat of his immunity and he was led away in handcuffs from the parliament chamber. Two years earlier he had been prime minister. Investigators accused him of taking about 250 million dollars in bribes linked to a massive bank fraud, and in 2016 a court sentenced him to nine years.
Filat was born in 1969 in the village of Lăpușna in Soviet Moldavia and served his military service in the KGB's border troops in Crimea. He then studied law across the border at the University of Iași in Romania, where he led an association of students from Bessarabia and married his wife after only three months of dating. In the mid-1990s he ran trading businesses in Iași before returning home in 1998 to direct the state privatisation department.
His political climb was steady rather than dazzling. He spent a decade in the Democratic Party, entered parliament in 2005, and finished fourth with 8.32 percent in the 2007 race for mayor of Chișinău. That year he founded his own Liberal Democratic Party. In the July 2009 election it won 18 seats and became the leading force in the pro-European governing coalition, and Filat took office as prime minister that September. He also served briefly as acting president in 2010.
Trouble arrived through a censure vote. On March 8, 2013, parliament dismissed his government amid charges of corruption, abuse of power and influence peddling. President Nicolae Timofti renominated him anyway, but the Constitutional Court struck that down, ruling that a prime minister ousted over corruption suspicions could not carry on, and Iurie Leancă took over.
The bribery case centred on the 2014 bank fraud scandal and payments allegedly received from businessman Ilan Shor. Filat called the charges politically motivated. In 2019 a UK investigation found his son had paid £390,000 upfront for a Knightsbridge flat and £200,000 for a Bentley. Filat walked free that December, six years before his sentence would have ended.
Source: Vlad Filat
