“Of course I will promulgate it. Justice remains independent, but it has to do its job – regardless of whether these changes are made now or would have been made later,” Sandu said.
We shall remind you that on June 12, the parliament adopted in the second reading the draft law on Moldova’s national security and on the amendment of some normative acts. One of the main innovations is that the decisions of the National Security Council will be administrative acts, binding. Failure to execute or obstruction of their execution “is a crime and is subject to criminal punishment,” the draft says.
The SSC includes the head of state, the speaker, the prime minister and other members of the government and heads of central authorities. It also included the director of the Center for Strategic Communication and Combating Disinformation.
At today’s meeting, the members of the SSC spoke about “actions to counter information manipulation and foreign interference in the electoral process”. As Maia Sandu said, the greatest danger of interference comes from the Russian Federation, which “represents a direct threat to the security of our state, the sovereignty of our country and Moldova’s European future”.
Among the “tools of foreign interference” Sandu named “cyberattacks aimed at blocking and disabling electoral infrastructure, websites of state institutions, phishing attacks on government infrastructure, creation of fake platforms or cloning of official resources, use of the church in the interests of a foreign state, involvement of the sports environment of certain clubs, sabotage of elections in the diaspora”.
According to her, illegal financing is carried out through various channels: cryptocurrency, “couriers”, accounts in the Russian Promsvyazbank.
At the same time, the head of state pointed out that “those who sell their vote risk being fined from 25 thousand to 37.5 thousand lei”.
“Already fines have been imposed on about 25 thousand citizens and 15 million lei have been recovered. If the crime is committed in the interests of a criminal organization, the punishment is 8 to 15 years in prison. For bribing voters, the punishment is 2 to 6 years of imprisonment or a fine of 37,500 to 57,500 lei, as well as deprivation of the right to hold certain positions.”
Elections to the Moldovan parliament will be held on September 28.
