Acquittal with two different reasons in the case of a nephew of the mayor of Chiajna, judged by Lia Savonea. Rise Project reveals the 12-year-old secret of the ICCJ head's career

An investigation by the Rise Project shows that “a decision of a panel chaired by judge Lia Savonea remained a secret for 12 years in her career”, in a case in which a nephew of the mayor of Chiajna was definitively acquitted, after he had initially been sentenced to 7 years in prison for robbery.

According to the journalistic investigation, the acquittal has two different motivations, one online and one on file, an unprecedented situation for the magistrates consulted by Rise Project journalists.

In addition, the composition of the panel was changed even before the final decision, and Lia Savonea and someone close to her entered the file “shoulder to shoulder” after proposing and approving the change of the panel.

“The administration of the evidence was already completed by other judges. The experts consulted by RISE claim that we are facing a possible case of abuse of office because the principle of continuity of the panel was violated and the composition was changed without a solid justification,” Rise Project notes.

The journalists also show that, at the time of the acquittal decision, “Lia Savonea had been associated for 7 years on a plot of land in Chiajna with the underworld's uncle.”

“The underworld's name is Sorin Raiciu and he is one of the members of the “Litrașu” clan. He is the nephew of the controversial mayor of the Chiajna commune, Mircea Minea, who has been in office for 30 years”, according to the investigation. “The man has a long criminal history. At the time of committing the robbery, he already had a conviction in another case. Today he is on trial for attempted murder.”

In the same file, “another brother of the mayor of Minea appears in the transcripts of the robbery file, as he guides the witnesses what to declare at the hearings”, according to the documents analyzed by Rise.

The robbery

The journalists reconstruct the events of December 23, 2008, when “in the evening of Christmas carols, a man returns home behind the wheel of his car after a day of work”, having “62,000 lei – the receipts of his company for that day – and another 3,000 lei, personal money”. When he arrives in front of the house, “three hooded men approach his car”, and “one of the attackers slashes his tire, and the other two pull him out of the car and hit him hard in the face, then snatch his money bag and run away”.

“A witness follows the individuals and manages to see the number of the car, a black BMW, which he notes with his finger on the dust on another car,” and based on this clue the suspect is quickly identified. “It is about Sorin Raiciu, a member of the “Litrașu” Clan from Chiajna”.

The first alibi

Rise shows that Raiciu's defense was based on an alibi according to which “there was no way he could have been at the scene of the robbery because he was at Plaza Romania that evening.”

At 19:53, Sorin Raiciu enters the Plaza Romania mall in the Lujer area, where he is seen by the cameras. Two minutes later, at 7:55 p.m., he buys a vest, receives a receipt showing the time of purchase, then leaves the shopping complex.

Raiciu is detained that evening, and the case prosecutor requests an arrest warrant for 29 days, approved by a judge.

“Back in Chiajna, Raiciu is jumped by the policemen who had identified his car a little earlier. The police do a brief search of the vehicle, without finding the briefcase, but interrupt the checks because Raiciu's relatives – gathered at the scene – start making a fuss. The car is seized and taken to the station, where the investigations are continued”, reports the journalists.

“On the second search, the police find in the BMW the tax receipt and the vest bought at the mall, but also an accounting document which, according to the victim, was in the missing briefcase with the stolen money. This document will be used by the investigators, among other evidence, to obtain a conviction with execution in the first instance.

Six days after the robbery, the police came into possession of the victim's briefcase, which had been found by a man behind a shopping complex near the Plaza Mall. The prosecutors thus dismantle the hypothesis launched by Raiciu that the accounting document would have been planted by the police in his car two days before. The local had found the briefcase on the road leading to the mall where Raiciu had bought his vest.

In front of the investigators, Sorin Raiciu constantly claimed that he could not have been at the scene of the robbery because that evening he was at Plaza România, where he was recorded by the video surveillance system while shopping. In other words, he couldn't be in two places at the same time. The argument will be one of the pieces of resistance on which Raiciu's defense will be based,” the press investigation shows.

However, “the difference between the time of the robbery and the time indicated on the CCTV footage (…) was about 20 minutes”, and the investigators conducted experiments to verify the hypothesis.

“They used a Dacia Logan (…) to travel the distance between Plaza Romania and the place of the robbery”, and the results showed that “the journey took 4 minutes on the short route, respectively 7 minutes on the long route”. Under these conditions, the prosecutor's conclusion was that “the defendant had at his disposal a time interval of approximately 20 minutes to cover a route of 2.4 km”.

The second alibi

“While in custody, Sorin Raiciu tried to fabricate evidence in his favor with the help of his relatives.

In a criminal complaint, Raiciu claimed that the robbery was committed by another person, citing a speeding ticket received while his car was impounded and he was in custody. Raiciu's defenders thus invoked the existence of another BMW, with the same registration numbers, caught by the radar on January 24, 2009, in a town in Prahova county. The fine had been received by Raiciu's sister”, the journalists also show.

Prosecutors analyzed the photos of the two cars and found that the license plates of the fined car were fake. In addition, the car with false numbers had only one exhaust pipe, while Raiciu's car – the one identified by witnesses to the robbery and under police seizure – had two exhaust pipes.

Later, the relatives tried to reach an agreement with the victim.

Dede, one of the brothers of the mayor of Chiajna

Rise Project journalists discovered that Dede is the brother of Marian Velicu, one of the brothers of the mayor of Chiajna, Mircea Minea.

“The problems created by the groups around the mayor in recent years made local people speak – some officially, others only under the protection of anonymity. This is how we obtained the phone numbers used by Dede, as well as details about his life. The brother of the mayor of Chiajna also had a criminal record. He was sentenced to 6 years for theft in 1989, and in 2003 he obtained rehabilitation in court. Since then, he has not officially had any problems with the law. Formally, he was employed at a company subscribed to public contracts with the City Hall in Chiajna, led by his brother. To his friends, Marian Velicu was always Dede”, writes Rise Project.

Dede (Marian Velicu) was involved from the beginning in the association between his brother, Florin Purcel, and the Savonea family.

“Several experts from the judicial system claim that the presence of judge Lia Savonea in Raiciu's team is a problem, given that she crossed paths with Dede in the context of this real estate transaction,” the journalists note.

The panel that gave the acquittal decision

According to Rise Project, on December 10, 2013, at the Bucharest Court of Appeal, Sorin Raiciu was waiting for the final solution in the robbery case, after “six months before he had received a sentence of 7 years in prison with execution”.

“The appeal was chaired by Lia Savonea, the head of the Court of Appeal at that time”, along with two other judges, and the investigation details their profile and the context in which the decision was made.

One of the judges was “Daniel Grădinaru, in Lia Savonea's circle-zero of trust”, about whom Rise notes that “he rose in his career to the level of president of the Superior Council of Magistracy (CSM), where he is now only a member” and that “he also owns a property in Chiajna, purchased almost two decades ago”.

The third member of the panel was “Dumitrița Piciarcă”, who, “at the time of the decision, was being criminally investigated by the DNA for abuse of office and intellectual forgery”, which, according to the investigation, “gave her a fragile position at the time of the sentencing”. Rise also notes that she “was suspended from the magistracy a few months later, when she was also sent to trial.”

“Between the sentencing in the Raiciu case (December 10, 2023) and the suspension from office (April 18, 2024), Piciarcă drafted the first motivation in the robbery case. This motivation was drafted by Piciarcă and was uploaded to ECRIS, from where it was indexed by legal aggregators, such as Law 5. There I found it and studied it.

To the case file, located in the archive of the 6th District Court, I found attached another motivation, different from the one in the Lege5 portal, written this time by judge Daniel Grădinaru.

The change in reasoning took place after the victim of the robbery had repeatedly requested the Court of Appeal, led by Lia Savonea, to expedite the reasoning of the sentence because she intended to file a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), being dissatisfied with Raiciu's acquittal. In the absence of motivation, the victim claimed that he risks losing the right to refer to the European court, due to the expiry of the deadline for submitting the complaint”, the press investigation shows.

The Rise Project journalists discovered, however, that neither Grădinaru nor Savonea were from the beginning part of the panel with number 3R (appeal), Criminal Section 1, where the robbery case against Raiciu had been assigned.

Read the full Rise Project investigation HERE.