Weekly, our society is informed about goods and luxury properties obtained illegally, which the state decides to seize following some investigations. Few, however, know about the determining role of the Criminal Asset Recovery Agency (ARBI) in their identification and preservation. In an interview. Serghei Carapunarlî, director of ARBI, presented extensive details about the Agency’s activity and how the recovery of goods takes place.
According to Serghei Carapunarlî, until the creation of ARBI, the people who earned income from illegal activities, could use these assets after serving the criminal sentence. After 2017, when the Agency was created, things took a different turn. Today, among properties seized by ARBI there are bank accounts, cars, aircrafts, real estate or even yachts.
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Seizure also applies to cultural assets: paintings, sculptures, musical instruments. Thus, it is necessary to ensure special conditions to keep these things. Serghei Carapunarlî also revealed that in the Republic of Moldova there are cases in which criminals invest their ill-gotten gains in cryptocurrencies. “We have cases of asset seizures in cryptocurrencies. In this sense, we also established a specific wallet, and we manage them. But, unfortunately, the Republic of Moldova does not have regulations in the field of cryptocurrency,” ARBI chief says.
The Criminal Assets Recovery Agency is a specialized autonomous subdivision within the National Anticorruption Center. ARBI was founded in 2017, and it aims to perform parallel financial investigations as well as seizure of criminal assets. In the five years of activity, ARBI has managed to identify and confiscate, in the country and abroad, goods and assets worth more than 6 billion
lei.
This material was made with the support of the Soros Moldova Foundation, in partnership with Agency for the Recovery of Criminal Assets, an autonomous subdivision within the CNA. The foundation does not influence the editorial policy of the Realitatea Press Group.