Citat:
Vlad Filat, until recently Liberal Democrat Prime Minister of Moldova, is locked in a power struggle with Vladimir Plahotniuc, the country’s one and only oligarch. This war of attrition threatens the Eastern Partnership’s ‘success story’ and with it Moldova’s reform project says Andrew Wilson.
Not every policy detail may have been perfect in Moldova since 2009, but at least the narrative seemed right. Eastern Europe’s only ruling Communist Party fell from government. The changeover was mythologised as the ‘Twitter Revolution’ – a precursor of the ‘Arab Spring’ and ‘Moscow Winter’ – although in fact it was a prosaic process of elections and parliamentary arithmetic. The Communists were replaced by the smooth-sounding Alliance for European Integration, which was soon getting rave reviews for its reform efforts from the EU. Tiny Moldova leapfrogged the other five states in the Eastern Partnership and seemed to be first in the queue to sign an Association and Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement at the Vilnius summit in November 2013.
...
So what went wrong? In reality, the three-party Alliance for European Integration was badly designed at birth; more exactly, at its rebirth. The first incarnation of the AEI in 2009-2010 struggled with a minimal majority over the Communists. That majority was improved at new elections in November 2010, but the elections also gave Russia the chance to push hard for an alternative alliance between the Communists and the pivotal Democratic Party (which includes many ex-Communists). Vladimir Putin sent his right-hand man, Sergei Naryshkin, to Chisinau to seal the deal. He didn’t succeed but encouraged the Democrats to secure a high price for not defecting back to the Communists, with the signing of a secret agreement in December 2010, leaked in 2012, to partition not just ministries but also supposedly neutral state institutions and revenue streams among the AEI’s three component parties.
...
The Democrats, financed by Vladimir Plahotniuc, Moldova’s lone ‘oligarch,’ took over the legal sector. They already controlled many courts, which they had used to protect the financial operations of the old Communist elite – and indeed to take over many of those operations. Although now in opposition, the Communists therefore de facto helped the Democrats by continuing to block attempts to reform the system they had set up before 2009.
But the Democrats also pushed hard to expand their influence, adding the Prosecutor General’s office and the National Anti-Corruption Centre (NAC) to their empire. The NAC was set up with good intentions in 2002 but turned into its ironic opposite: its legal powers were used to soften up and take over businesses targeted by Plahotniuc. The scourge of so-called raiderstvo [corporate raiding] actually increased. In 2010-2011 Moldova-Agroindbank (the largest domestic bank), Victoriabank (the second largest), Banca de Economii (the Savings Bank of Moldova) and the largest insurance company, ASITO, all saw sudden and often unexplained changes of ownership to obscure offshore companies, usually on the basis of secret court proceedings. Two of the alleged victims, Victor and Viorel Topa, now have a case before the English courts, accusing Plahotniuc of orchestrating the change to seize their assets. Banca de Economii has also been accused of laundering $53 million out of the $230 million for the Russian suspects in the Magnitsky case.
...
Moldovan politics had seemed stalemated between the AEI and the Communists since 2009. But political loyalties were now scrambled. All parties in parliament now began making fluid alliances with one another – and encouraging defectors from opposition ranks. Filat was able to use Communist votes to remove Plahotniuc as deputy chairman of parliament on 15 February but could do little to offset the damage to his own reputation.
On 5 March, Filat was defeated in a confidence vote, but he realized that hanging on to office in some form, no matter how, was key, both to his own survival and to any hopes of containing Plahotniuc. Unlike neighbouring Ukraine, he could not play a game of divide and rule among the local oligarchs, as there was only one – Plahotniuc. Filat could only counter-balance Plahotniuc’s financial resources if he still controlled the resources of the state.
Shock deal with the Democrats
Filat therefore sought re-nomination as prime minister on 10 April. The AEI was no more, but his own party remained reasonably solid behind him. The Liberal Party split (see below). There were also a handful of defectors from the Communist Party. This was a plurality but not a majority; Filat could have tried to govern alone or maintain the informal alignment with the Communists. The decision on 17 April to strike a power-sharing deal with the Democrats therefore came as a shock. Worse, it looked like a bad deal: the Democrats were left in control of all the key legal ministries. Plahotniuc’s ally, Corneliu Gurin, was made Prosecutor General.
