JusMin Toader: I won’t give up on the procedure to remove PG Augustin Lazar from office

Justice Minister Tudorel Toader argues that he won’t give up on the procedure to remove current Prosecutor General of Romania Augustin Lazar from office. “I won’t give up on the procedure to remove the current prosecutor general. It’s worth noticing the different approach that the Cotroceni Presidential Palace has – the request for removal “is not opportune from a political viewpoint” in comparison with the request for removal “is not adequate”!!!,” Tudorel Toader wrote on Monday on his Facebook page, in a post scriptum to a previous post. Toader announced he will publish on Tuesday the procedure and the appointment calendar, as well as Prosecutor General Augustin Lazar’s candidacy file. “Tomorrow, I will present the procedure and the appointment calendar of the current prosecutor general. Tomorrow, I will also make public the content of his candidacy file. In order to be able to identify all the inconsistencies, it would be preferable to also know the content of the file based on which the appointment decree was approved and signed. Normally, the filed from the MJ [the Justice Ministry], the CSM [the Superior Council of Magistracy] and Cotroceni should have the same content!,” he wrote in his post. Last week, the Minister of Justice initiated the procedure for removing Prosecutor General of Romania Augustin Lazar from office. The report regarding the managerial activity of the Prosecutor General specified that President Klaus Iohannis would not have checked the regularity of Augustin Lazar’s appointment as Romania’s Prosecutor General, the proposal being made by the Minister of Justice at that time with the non-observance of the legal provisions. “We don’t know if this omission has to do with the fact that the Prosecutor General’s candidacy file included precisely a decision on the dismissal of a case related to Romania’s President in office,” the report mentions. The CSM saaid that Lazar’s candidacy file did not include any resolution dismissing a case involving Iohannis. Augustin Lazar requested the Department for Human Resources and Organisation of the CSM to release a copy of the “resolution regarding the dismissal of a case involving Romania’s President in office,” a document which was supposedly included in the file from 2016 with the proposal to appoint Lazar in office. “Following your request (…), we bring to your knowledge that, after checking the documentation attached to our file (…) (regarding the approval of the Minister of Justice’s proposal to appoint as Prosecutor General of the Prosecutor’s Office attached to the High Court of Cassation and Justice Mr Augustin Lazar, prosecutor general of the Prosecutor’s Office attached to the Alba Iulia Court of Appeals), no such document was identified that would refer to the topic you mentioned in your request,” said the document sent by the CSM to Augustin Lazar.