The National Integrity Commission (CNI) is geting a new name – National Integrity Authority (ANI) – as well as more powers than it currently can own.

This is a translation from the original article. 

On August 1 a number of laws and amendments take effect to boost the so-called integrity package which the parliament passed on June 17 and the president has already approved. 

CNI Becomes ANI

Those bills change the way public functionaries are obliged to declare their properties and personal interests but also modifies the structure of the National Integrity Commission (CNI), which wll have a new name – National Integrity Authority (ANI). The renamed institution will employ a new sort of officers: integrity inspectors. The 30-strong force of inspectors will be able to ask for information and explanations from people who are oblige to report that information and from people who hold information about the first. ANI inspectors will be allowed to seek answers from individuals and firms by scrutinizing the assets, personal interests, legal status, conflict of interests, incompatible situations, and limitations. They will be working in office and in field. There is an innovation in this law: persons or firms which file complaints with bad intention are called „tendentious petitioners” are can be punished. 

Affiliations Included 

The Law on Declaration of Personal Incomes and Properties (part of the integrity package) also contains an innovation.

Until now the properties and personal interests needed to be reported on separate form sheets; from now on there will be a single form sheet. The reason why this was necessary is that many sections were present in both forms. 

Beginning this year all functionaries will declare the properties and incomes of paramours, because until now many of them used to register their properties on the names of wives/husbands after a fictive divorce, thus attempting to avoid compliance with the law.

More lines were added to define close persons who fall under the incidence of the new changes. Now the functionaries must declare their own incomes and properties as well as the incomes and properties of husbands/wives, paramours, and relatives by blood or adoption until the 4th degree (parents, brothers/sisters, grandparents, grandchildren, nephew, niece, aunts/uncles) and relatives by affinity (brother- and sister-in-law, father- or mother-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law). 

By broadening the list of relatives and affiliates the lawmakers took into account old practices when high ranking functionaries used to hire or made purchaces from relatives or family members.

Many judges for example have declared zero properties and indicated a parent-in-law’s home as their place of residence. Or the home of a paramour. An example in this regard is a former mayor of Leova town who hired his nephew (his sister’s son) as deputy mayor. Then CNI did not act since the old law made no reference to this kind of relationships. 

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This article was funded from a grant offered by the U.S. Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions of this article do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of State.