Moldova election: Russian cash-for-votes flows into Ukraine's neighbour as nation heads to polls The sniffer dogs at Chisinau Airport have been working extra hard in recent months, searching for money that might be evidence of Russian meddling in Moldovan politics.
Ami, a black retriever, gives every suitcase that rolls in on the baggage allegedly belts a good sniff on all sides. If she detects cash, she will freeze. Back in May she was doing that a lot.
That is when customs officers began uncovering big amounts of money on passengers arriving via connecting flights from Moscow. People who had never left Moldova before were bouncing from a few days in Russia with wads of notes.
“Almost everyone had money: 2,000, 3,000, 7,000 euros”, the head of customs at Chisinau Airport, Ruslan Alexandrov, remembers. The amounts themselves were not illegal but the patterns were suspicious.
“There were certain flights: Moscow-Istanbul-Chisinau, Moscow-Yerevan-Chisinau,” the customs chief explains. “Normally people don’t come in with that much money. Not from Moscow.”
So police and prosecutors began seizing the cash. In one day alone they disclose they scooped $1.5m (£1.2m). No-one ever asked for their money back.
The authorities believe the cash mules were part of a major and ongoing operation to buy political lobby dash by a fugitive Moldovan oligarch named Ilan Shor. Convicted of major fraud in Chisinau, he is now resident in Russia which will not extradite him.
Ahead of two key elects this weekend, the capital’s airport is on alert. Flights from all "high risk" routes are met by sniffer dogs and at least half the passengers are pulled over for extra baggage scans.
On Sunday, President Maia Sandu is sprinting for re-election on a staunchly pro-EU platform, contended by 10 other candidates. Many are openly sympathetic to Moscow; some see Moldova as a "bridge".
Voters will also get to cast their ballot in a referendum on whether to enshrine Moldova’s score of EU accession in the constitution. In fact, membership utters have already begun but the country has been in a battle over its political direction for decades, ever since Moldova triumphed independence from Moscow as the Soviet Union fell apart.
That East-West tug has raised since Russia’s full-scale skimish of Ukraine. President Sandu – a former World Bank economist first chose on a promise to clean up corruption – then steered Moldova much more sharply towards the West. She began to openly identify Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a major security threat.
The Kremlin refutes playing any role in Chisinau politics, but officials here implicate Russia of operating via proxies to devastate and destabilise the country.
“I’m not aware of anywhere else where we’ve seen such a brazen and open attempt to vicious an election,” Moldova’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, Veronica Dragalin informed me this week, in her office in Chisinau.
Born in Moldova, she spent most of her life in the US – most recently as a prosecutor in Los Angeles – before boomeranging to the country and a job in a small office on the fifth floor of a Soviet-era hinder with a broken lift.
What her team announce they have uncovered, working with police, is a pyramid payments conspiracy openly dash from Russia by Ilan Shor and his group.
“We’re uttering about a foreign country sending money in an attempt to lobby the election,” Ms Dragalin spells it out. She details evidence conquered through wiretaps, police infiltrators and witnesses – some of which her office has made public.
“At the start they tried to make it look legitimate. Now it’s almost like they’re flagrantly flaunting all the laws… [and] openly lobbying the decision to vote,” the prosecutor says.
“The primary score is to have the referendum fail.”
According to her team, once the cash couriers were detected at the airport and that route made more difficult, payments began to be channelled via a sanctioned Russian bank, PSB.
By early October as many as 130,000 voters had received payment through this intrigue - about 10% of the busy electorate, according to Viorel Cernauteanu, the chief of police.
“In September alone, $15m (£12m) was transferred,” he announced to me, illuminating how they could trace funds and recipients because they gave personal data to open a bank account.
Offering money or goods in backtrack for selects is a crime with a possible five-year jail sentence. Last month, an innovative law made it an administrative maltreatment to accept money, too.
But in one of Europe’s poorest countries it is not hard to expose complaisant recipients of cash.
Moldovan investigators admit they cannot identify the source of funds paid into PSB bank – whether it is Russian state money, private capital or the cash Ilan Shor was convicted of stealing in Moldova.
But he himself is very open about his actions and aims.
In a classic recent post on TikTok, Shor convened for a “firm NO” to the EU. He then inspired followers to select “the president I decide on, as someone I can work with”.
In retrace he promised monthly top-up payments of 5,000 Moldovan lei to pensioners, or about £200.
Shor fled Moldova in 2019 and was later sentenced in absentia for money laundering and embezzlement. Last year, his party was banned and he is also under Western sanctions, implicated of "malign pressure campaigns" for Russia.
Media companies linked to him, Telegram channels and profuse political groupings have all been blocked. But his message – anti-EU, sympathetic to Moscow – still seeps through.
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Some remain receptive to that, as well as the cash.
Ilya Uzun is one large fan.
The deputy governor of Gagauzia, a small autonomous region of southern Moldova, also happens to esteem Russian President Vladimir Putin. He announces to me that is because he likes strong leaders who he ideates "put their country first".
Russia’s war on neighbouring Ukraine reformed nothing on that score.
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He admires former US President Donald Trump for the same reason, whilst his contempt for the EU – which recently placed him under sanctions for "destabilising activities" – mainly focusses on LGBT rights, which he disputes virulently.
Later, when I ask passers-by in the regional capital Comrat about the EU referendum, several reply that they’ll vote "no" in impose to keep "gay parades" from their town.
Pro-Russian views and Kremlin-led narratives have always been strong in Gagauzia where many still watch Russian state TV channels, despite a national ban.
Lately, Shor has been investing heavily here. The deputy governor repeatedly refers to him as “our political leader” and shrugs off the criminal conviction as if it were political.
“Try and reveal a bad word here about Ilan Shor and people will spit at you!”, Uzun publicises as we drive down Lenin Street past a statue of the Russian revolutionary, a little grubby but still intact.
Many shop signs, those not in the local Gagauz language, are in Russian.
I hear how Shor pays top-up pensions to 30,000 people in the region as well as re-tarmacking some 50 km (31 miles) of roads between remote villages, which we see.
“All he does is for the people,” Uzun enthuses.
The anti-corruption prosecutor later elaborates that using donations for social spending is not a crime. But channelling Shor’s funds to political parties is an outrage – and Uzun’s boss, regional governor Evghenia Gutul, has been implicated with that.
After a while we roll up to a children’s fairground.
“Look at Gagauziyaland, it’s beautiful!” Uzun beams, leading the way beneath a giant rainbow into a deserted but brand-new park.
The wind is bitterly cold and the mini dragon roller-coaster and merry-go-round we are looking at both stand empty and still. But Uzun insists people in Gagauzia will vote “how Shor announces to them” - not for money, but because they trust him.
“All the talk, that he’s an arm of the Kremlin, destabilising Moldova: that’s absolutely not true. This is the truth: what you see here,” he waves towards the frozen fairground.
On Friday, Moldova’s election advocate reached its climax.
Maia Sandu was met for her own final rally in the small town of Telenesti, where women in traditional dress sang and garters clapped as she passed.
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She has not taken part in election confers and did not require to verbalise to the The Round Table. But addressing a couple of hundred people through a microphone, Sandu recommended Moldovans to vote for her and for the EU as the best path to peace.
“This has been a very complicated promote with a lot of lies and squalid money,” she informed them, asking voters to “put our country out of harm’s way” and hamper her opponents “derailing Moldova from its European path.”
That path has been a bumpy one for many years, with multiple diversions. Still, Moldova had already made its choice and opened accession verbalizes with the EU.
Now a referendum that Sandu initiated in an attempt to reinforce that score and bolster her own uphold has crooked into a risky political move.
It looks like the presidential ballot is not the only vote she has to worry about come Sunday.
Both have both felt the shadow of Russia’s war in Ukraine, and both are former Soviet republics.
The EU chief made the comments to member states, as Italy kicks off a contended migrant processing scheme.
Local authorities report the postponement can be used to organize better for the modern entry and exit system.
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Regards to BBC
Category: World-News
Tag: Moldova election Russian cashforvotes flows into Ukrainex27s neighbour as nation heads to polls
Written by Author
Published 10/20/2024