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The resigning head of the Office for the Prevention and Fight against Money Laundering will spend the next 30 days under house arrest.
Accused of fraud, Laurenţiu Baranga admitted to investigators that her entire career was based on a false high school degree. He explained that he would not have time to finish high school because he had several businesses.
Laurenţiu Baranga’s life fundamentally changed in just 24 hours. At the end of marathon hearings, the former head of some of the most important institutions of public order and national security ended up spending a night behind bars. A restraining order was issued in his name, following the scandal of the high school diploma that he allegedly bought at the age of 32 from a ring of counterfeiters, without even finishing high school.
Laurenţiu Baranga has every reason to regret that she did not obtain her bachelor’s degree legally. If he initially denied any involvement in this alleged large-scale fraud, put before the evidence, now the former head of the Office for the Prevention of Money Laundering turned a blind eye: he admitted that he took the false diploma. But he justified to the researchers that he was in business at the time and couldn’t afford to do two more years of high school after only 10 graduating classes.
Prosecutors from the Criminal and Forensic Investigation Section have already gathered evidence to convince the courts that the way in which Baranga built his professional and academic career would be illegal.
The alleged baccalaureate degree was allegedly awarded to him by a large network of counterfeiters detected by the police in 2009. Liviu Dragnea was also on the list of those attacked for allegedly benefiting from false documents, suspected of having attended a phantom college. His school status was later vacated by District Court 4.
Vicențiu Gherghe, Prosecutor’s Office attached to District Court 4: “There were indications that five people were falsifying records in order to take the licensing exams. The fee for each falsified file was 3,500 euros. Many did not have a high school degree, but the group also forged these diplomas. With an additional fee of 600 euros paid by the applicant, the members of the group also ensured the presence in the respective license examination of a person other than the one who had to appear.
And the bad news is true for the 11-year-old head of the National Registry of State Intelligence: Prosecutors will extend the investigation to undergraduate degrees. According to his CV, Laurenţiu Baranga would have obtained a degree from the Faculty of Management of the Ecological University of Bucharest.
However, his fate will be decided only by the judges, the only ones who can say whether or not he is guilty of deception and, possibly, what punishment he deserves. If he is prosecuted and charged without insisting on a lengthy trial, his sentence could be reduced by a third. However, he would have been forced to return the sums of money earned over 20 years from the institutions in which he worked through fraudulent studies.
