Former Minister of Youth and Sport Monica Iacob Ridzi was handed down a final five-year prison sentence by the High Court of Cassation and Justice on Monday, in a case in which she was charged with abuse of position in relation to the organisation of the Youth Day in 2009.
The sentence shall be served, the High Court decided, Agerpres reports.
The judges also maintained a five-year prison sentence to be served by Ioana Varsta, a former advisor to Iacob Ridzi.
The High Court rejected Iacob Ridzi's appeal and maintained the first court ruling from Jan. 27, 2014.
The indictment shows that the former minister, in her capacity of head of a public institution that received money from the budget decided to illegally assign service-providing contracts to several private firms under the pretext of organising large-scale events nationwide to celebrate the National Youth Day and under the pretext of outsourcing the relevant organisation services.
At the date the case began being prosecuted, the Ministry of Education, Research, Youth and Sport decided to become a civil part in the lawsuit with the amount of 640,000 euros, stressing it was reserving itself the right to modify such amount depending on the final damage set on the basis of the entire proofs.
Iacob Ridzi, a Minister of Youth and Sport from Dec. 2008 — July 2009 was prosecuted in May 2011 by the National Anti-corruption Directorate prosecutors on charges of having committed several crimes: qualified abuse of position against the public interests, intellectual forgery relating continued corruption deeds, improper participation in the offence of getting unentitled access to an information system perpetrated by violating the security measures, improper participation in the offence of modifying, deleting or deteriorating information data without having any right to do so.