The Bucharest Court of Appeal annulled the 3-year and 8-month prison sentence of former STS chief Florin Mihalache

General Florin Mihalache, former head of the Special Telecommunications Service, was definitively acquitted by the Bucharest Court of Appeal in the case in which he had been convicted of influence peddling, money laundering, and forgery in private documents. On Thursday, the court admitted the appeal and fully overturned the Bucharest Tribunal’s ruling, issued in December 2023.

The judges established that there was no evidence that Mihalache had committed the offenses of influence peddling and forgery, while in the case of the money-laundering charge they found that the act did not exist. The decision is final.

The National Anticorruption Directorate indicted him in May 2022, accusing him that, between August 2021 and January 2022, he had allegedly asked a company administrator for a luxury car or its equivalent value, 75,000 euros. In return, he allegedly promised to use his influence over a businessman involved in commercial litigation to settle debts of approximately 1.5 million euros. Prosecutors claimed that the amount had allegedly been concealed through a fictitious loan agreement and that Mihalache had received the money in January 2022, when the offense was caught in the act.