Moldova jails pro-Russian regional leader for election fraud weeks before crucial vote

CNN

6 days ago

A court in Moldova has sentenced a Kremlin-friendly regional politician to seven years in prison for funneling money from Russia to finance a political party.
Evgenia Gutul, the leader of Gagauzia, a historically pro-Russian ethnic region in southern Moldova, was detained in March on suspicion of electoral fraud and sentenced on Tuesday.
Prosecutors said that from 2019 to 2022, Gutul channeled undeclared funds into the country to finance a political party founded by Ilan Shor, Reuters reported. Shor is a pro-Russian businessman who has been convicted of fraud in Moldova and now lives in exile.
Gutul's conviction comes just weeks before Moldovans vote in a crucial parliamentary election, in which Maia Sandu, the pro-Western president of the former Soviet country, is hoping to retain her governing majority.
Sandu was reelected as president last year in a vote held on the same day as a referendum on joining the European Union, which Moldovans backed by a razor-thin majority. Both votes were marred by what prosecutors said was a massive vote-buying scheme orchestrated by Shor, who has spent much of his time in Russia since he was convicted for his role in the 2014 theft of $1 billion from Moldovan banks.
Before the referendum, Moldova's national police chief said some 130,000 citizens had received a total of $15 million from Shor in exchange for voting 'no' or persuading others to do so. The police chief said it was 'clear' that Russia was financing the scheme; Moscow has denied meddling in Moldovan politics.
Gutul, a former secretary for Shor's now-banned party, was elected governor of Gagauzia in 2023. That election also drew accusations of vote-buying.
Last year, Gutul was sanctioned by the EU for actions 'destabilizing' Moldova and promoting separatism in her region.
Gutul denies wrongdoing and claims her prosecution was politically motivated. In March, she penned a letter to Donald Trump, claiming that she, like the US president, had been subjected to 'propaganda efforts and pressure from the corrupt globalist elites.'
Responding to her sentencing Tuesday, Gutul said she would appeal the ruling, which she claimed was an attempt to intimidate Gagauzians 'who dare to vote' for a party other than Sandu's Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS).
'This decision has nothing to do with justice. This is a political reprisal, planned and executed on orders from above,' she wrote on Telegram.
The Kremlin also claimed the verdict was politically motivated, and that Moldova was systematically suppressing the opposition.
'In effect, people are being deprived of the opportunity to vote for those they prefer. Of course, what we are seeing is a clear violation of democratic rules and norms in this country,' Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday.
Moldova's parliamentary election will be held on September 28. Although Sandu's PAS won by a landslide in the last vote in 2021, Moldova has since faced major economic and security challenges spilling over from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, stirring anti-government sentiment in parts of the country.