{"id":30708,"date":"2026-04-23T10:35:28","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T14:35:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/?p=30708"},"modified":"2026-04-23T10:35:28","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T14:35:28","slug":"moldovan-oligarch-jailed-in-1bn-theft-of-the-century-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/2026\/04\/23\/moldovan-oligarch-jailed-in-1bn-theft-of-the-century-case\/","title":{"rendered":"Moldovan oligarch jailed in $1bn ‘theft of the century’ case"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Vlad Plahotniuc, once Moldova’s richest man, has been sentenced to 19 years in jail in a banking fraud case known in the country as the “theft of the century”.<\/b><\/p>\n

Plahotniuc was found guilty of partaking in the 2014-15 fraud which involved $1bn (\u00a3748m) – at the time 12% of Moldova’s total GDP.<\/p>\n

He was personally accused of receiving over $40m from the fraud scheme and was ordered to pay around $60m (\u00a344m) to the state in damages.<\/p>\n

Plahotniuc, who denies any wrongdoing, was not present in court. His lawyer said he would appeal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Reuters said the prosecutor’s office argued it had data showing that Plahotniuc used the funds siphoned off from the banks for personal gain: the purchase of an Embraer Legacy 650 aircraft, the acquisition of property, paying for legal, medical, and tourism services, and business investments.<\/p>\n

The former oligarch was Moldova’s richest businessman and a prominent political figure when the “theft of the century” took place.<\/p>\n

In 2014, loans worth $1bn were transferred in just two days to a series of UK- and Hong Kong-registered companies whose owners were unknown.<\/p>\n

The government was forced to step in to bail the banks out, protecting depositors but creating a hole in the public finances equivalent to an eighth of Moldova’s GDP.<\/p>\n

A report later found that much of the funds had ended up in companies owned by pro-Russian oligarch Ilan Shor.<\/p>\n

Plahotniuc was not immediately accused of involvement. But by 2019 he was facing corruption charges and fled Moldova after his Democratic Party was ousted from power.<\/p>\n

He spent six years on the run and in July 2025 he was arrested at Athens while he was boarding a plane to Dubai and later extradited back to Moldova.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday prosecutors said Plahotniuc had used “his influence in the public, political, financial and criminal environments” to allegedly coordinate “a network… in order to obtain illicit benefits”.<\/p>\n

Authorities added that to achieve this goal Plahotniuc allegedly facilitated Shor’s entry into the shareholdings of some commercial banks, leading to fraud.<\/p>\n

Shor is now living in Moscow and has recently been accused of being the mastermind behind a pro-Russian vote-buying and vote-influencing scheme in Moldova.<\/p>\n

Plahotniuc faces several other long-running criminal cases in Moldova but denies involvement in any of them.<\/p>\n

His lawyers maintained that the prosecution’s stance was “politically motivated”.<\/p>\n

Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vlad Plahotniuc, once Moldova’s richest man, has been sentenced to 19 years in jail in a banking fraud case known in the country as the “theft of the century”. Plahotniuc was found guilty of partaking […]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30709,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[109,2,6],"tags":[7887,4554,4484,1109,305,2657,1060,6245,770,442],"class_list":{"0":"post-30708","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headline","8":"category-news","9":"category-world","10":"tag-athens","11":"tag-bank-fraud","12":"tag-dubai","13":"tag-extradited","14":"tag-fraud","15":"tag-greece","16":"tag-hong-kong","17":"tag-moldova","18":"tag-moscow","19":"tag-russia","20":"pmpro-has-access"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30708"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30710,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30708\/revisions\/30710"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}