Romania's High Court indicted Romanian House of Deputies speaker Liviu Dragnea to 3 years and 6 months in prison in a corruption case on Monday. Dragnea, head of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) has led the governing alliance with an iron fist for several years.
- UPDATE Liviu Dragnea showed up at the Rahova Penitentiary in Bucharest amid people's boos and filming journalists on Monday afternoon.
He was sentenced for abuse in office in a case related to the abusive, fictitious employment of personnel at a child welfare agency in Teleorman county, where he used to serve as county council president, in an affair benefiting the local PSD organisation.
He had received a 3 year and 6 months prison sentence in a previous court ruling. Now, Romania's Hight Court reviewed all sentences and kept the ruling on Dragnea. Dragnea had already received a suspended sentence in a different case for electoral fraud in 2016, so no suspension could be applied this time around.
With his previous sentence, he could not serve as prime minister despite his party winning the 2016 general elections. But he ruled the government with iron fist for two years and a half, through dummy PMs.
His government focused almost all its efforts in subduing the judiciary and put an end to the fight against corruption. But despite lots of victories, he failed to have a prime minister push through the necessary ordinances to prevent a new sentence or annul the previous one for Dragnea - ordinances that would have also have helped his cronies.
The PSD actions against the Judiciary for the past two years have led to massive protests.
And on Sunday, the first elections since the 2016 taking over of the government by the PSD, the party lost massive ground in EP elections, prompting President Klaus Iohannis and the opposition parties to call for the resignation of the PSD government.
