Romania's Supreme Court on Monday uphelded an earlier ruling jailing former agriculture ministers Decebal Traian Remes and Ioan Avram Muresan for three years for trading influence.

Remes, minister from April to October 2007, was found guilty of peddling influence while Muresan, minister between 1998 and 2000, was convicted of complicity in the same acts.

In 2007, Remes received €15,000 and food products - such as sausages and spirits - from a businessman through Muresan the courts ruled.

The businessman in question in return sought preferential treatment in a tender process managed by a public institution.

Muresan is already serving a jail sentence, being the first high-ranking official to be sentenced to seven years jail in 2012 for embezzling 1.2 million US dollars in grants from the United States Agency for International Development, USAID.

Romania is still considered one of the most corrupt states in the European Union and has made only limited progress in fighting corruption and organised crime since it joined the EU in 2007.

Bucharest has drawn repeated criticism from the European Commission for its failure to tackle corruption. But in recent months, the number of high-ranking officials sentenced for graft has increased significantly.

Last year, for example, former Prime Minister Adrian Nastase was sentenced to two years in prison for siphoning-off state funds worth around €1.6 million to fund his 2004 election campaign.

BalkanInsight            26/02/2013