Adrian Sârbu gets rid of the tax evasion file for good: the facts became statute-barred after 12 years
The Bucharest Court of Appeal confirmed, at the beginning of March 2026, the decision of the Bucharest Court of June 2025 by which Adrian Sârbu's tax evasion file was invalidated and sent back to the prosecutor's office. The decision is final, and its effect is predictable: the facts are already prescribed, which means that Sârbu escapes the accusations made by the prosecutors, according to G4media.
Adrian Sârbu PHOTO INQUAM Photos / George Calin
In the last indictment, drawn up on July 8, 2024, Sârbu was accused of tax evasion of over 4 million euros within the Mediafax group. According to the law, tax evasion with damage of more than 1 million euros is punishable by imprisonment between 8 and 15 years, which included the facts in the 10-year limitation period provided by article 154 of the Criminal Code.
How the prescription was arrived at
The Bucharest Court established last year that the acts committed in 2014 would have been time-barred in 2024, but the court held that the period of the state of emergency suspended the prescription:
“The limitation period for criminal liability, which began to run on 11.08.2014, will not expire on 11.08.2024, precisely as a result of the suspension of the limitation period between 16.03.2020 and 14.05.2020, the indictment being drawn up on 08 July 2024, respectively before the expiry of the limitation period of criminal liability“.
The statute of limitations ran in September 2024
In other words, the statute of limitations did not run in August 2024, but in September 2024. The return of the file to the prosecutor's office in 2025 and then in 2026 made it impossible to continue the prosecution.
Adrian Sârbu's case went through two referrals to court, two returns to the prosecutor's office and whole years of proceedings in the preliminary chamber.
Adrian Sârbu was pre-arrested in February 2015, for four months, for tax evasion, incitement to embezzlement and money laundering, and in 2016 the General Prosecutor's Office sued him for a damage of 14 million euros. After three years of the preliminary chamber, the Bucharest Court of Appeal validated the indictment in 2019, but in 2020 the High Court decided to return the file to the prosecutor's office, noting the invalidity of the financial-accounting expertise and irregularities in the accusations. In 2021, the case was sent to the DNA for connection, and in 2024 the anti-corruption prosecutors issued a new indictment, this time for a damage reduced to 4 million euros. The Bucharest Court invalidated the file in 2025, reasoning that the General Prosecutor's Office would not have legally divested itself when it transferred it to the DNA, and in March 2026 the Court of Appeal upheld this decision, which led to the return of the case to the prosecutor's office under the conditions in which the facts were already prescribed.
In the reasoning of the Bucharest Court, the judges emphasized:
“There is no legal way by which the PÎCCJ divested itself (…), not even being able to claim that the vesting of the body that issued the indictment in the present case would have been achieved only at the time of reuniting the file with the file (…)”.
With the prescription of criminal liability, the only way left is to recover the damage through civil means. ANAF can continue the steps to recover the amounts considered owed to the state, but the criminal process is definitively closed.
