USR Minister, reaction to the scandal regarding Radu Marinescu's doctoral thesis: “If it's plagiarized, it's complicated”

“If it's plagiarism, from my point of view, it's complicated”, reacted on Monday USR Minister of Defense, Radu Miruță, to the accusations of plagiarism aimed at his social-democratic colleague from Justice, Radu Marinescu, stating that the minister must come with public clarifications.

More than half of the doctoral thesis in Law of the Minister of Justice, Radu Marinescu, is plagiarized, journalist Emilia Șercan wrote in PressOne on Monday morning.

“If it's plagiarized, from my point of view, it's complicated. I don't know if the work of Minister Marinescu was plagiarized or not. I'm not a specialist to measure this. I think that at the level of a minister you have to show the highest rigor, at least professionally and academically and in your everyday life,” said Radu Miruţă, on Antena 3 CNN, according to News.ro.

The Minister of Defense added that “it is not clear to me whether it is plagiarized or not” in the case of Radu Marinescu's doctoral thesis.

“I saw that it is an accusation of plagiarism. There are specialist people who can analyze whether it is plagiarism”, Miruță also said.

According to the analysis published in PressOne, at least 56.68% of the pages of the work entitled “Evidence system in the civil process” contain text copied from other authors, more precisely 140 of the 247 pages of the work.

Radu Marinescu obtained the title of Doctor of Law in 2009, at the Faculty of Law and Administrative Sciences of the University of Craiova, under the supervision of Professor Ion Dogaru.

Most of the plagiarized content comes from three other works, and in some cases the text templates taken word for word stretch even up to 25 consecutive pages, noted Emilia Șercan.

Minister Radu Marinescu denied, in a statement given to PressOne, that he violated the standards for producing a scientific work: “I don't consider that I plagiarized. That's what I can tell you.”

In subsequent reactions during the day, Radu Marinescu rejected the accusations, saying that he does not consider that he plagiarized and that he developed his doctoral thesis “in accordance with the norms of the time and under the coordination of a reputable academic professor”.

The “norms of the time” included plagiarism in the category of forms of academic fraud at the time when Marinescu defended his doctoral thesis in 2009 (including by law, not just by academic provisions).

Also, in a telephone intervention on Antena 3 CNN, the Minister of Justice stated that he did not talk to the head of government after the publication of the article in which he is accused of plagiarism. However, Marinescu answered that “no, obviously not” – to the question of whether he will resign if Bolojan asks him to do so following the plagiarism scandal in which he is involved.

“I am resigning under the conditions in which the exercise of my mandate revealed managerial deficiencies, deficiencies in the application of the government program, when the Parliament withdraws the confidence of the Government, either in me as a minister or in the Government. The Prime Minister has his prerogatives and can exercise them as such”, declared Radu Marinescu, in his intervention on the quoted television station.