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The BC wants to notify the Prosecutor’s Office regarding the purchase of an unused software of almost half a million lei

08 September 2020
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The Broadcasting Council (BC) Chairman Dragos Vicol claims that BC has initiated an internal investigation and will notify the General Prosecutor’s Office in order to determine the circumstances in which a software of 415,000 lei, which has never been used, was purchased ten years ago. The damage was also reported in the latest audit of the Court of Accounts at the BC.

According to the audit report of the Court of Accounts (CA) for the period of 2018-2019, made public in June, the Mediamon system, intended for monitoring audiovisual programs, has not been used at all since 2010, when it was purchased, and led to damages of almost half a million lei. “At the request of the Council, in 2020, to adapt/reconfigure the system to new algorithms, the development company said that it would cost as much as the module itself. Taking into account the fact that the time of use of the information system is 5 years, that it has never worked, as well as the uncertain prospect of future use, it has been found that public funds in the amount of 415 thousand lei, used for the procurement of the information system, were wasted in 2010,” the report concludes.

Mediamon software was purchased when the BC chairman was Gheorghe Gorincioi, who was convicted in 2015 for corruption and died in the same year. Our attempts to find out which company developed the system were unsuccessful. The BC representatives avoided giving us details, saying that the purchase was made “under a contract.”

“It is not clear what the purpose of this software was. There are several reasonable suspicions. We are not a court or a prosecutor to give verdicts or file charges, but from the perspective of the functionality of this software I can definitely tell you that it has never been used,” Dragos Vicol commented for Media Azi.

The BC chairman says he has started an internal investigation and will file an application to the Prosecutor General’s Office to investigate the purchase. According to the law, the Council must notify prosecutors within 6 months after receiving the Court of Accounts report, i.e. by December 2020.