Moldova elections: Russian money for votes flows to Ukraine’s neighbor as country heads to the polls

“I don’t know of any other place where we have seen such a brazen and open attempt to corrupt elections,” Veronica Dragalin, Moldova’s top anti-corruption prosecutor, told me this week in her office in Chisinau.

Born in Moldova, she spent most of her life in the US – most recently as a prosecutor in Los Angeles – before returning to the country and taking a job in a small office on the fifth floor of a Soviet-era building with a broken elevator.

What her team says it has uncovered, working with police, is a pyramid scheme openly run from Russia by Ilan Shor and his group.

“We are talking about a foreign country sending money in an attempt to influence the election,” Ms. Dragalin said. She describes the evidence obtained through wiretaps, police infiltrators and witnesses – some of which her office has made public.

“At first they tried to make it look legitimate. Now it almost seems like they are blatantly flaunting all the laws… (and) openly influencing the decision to vote,” the complaint says.

“The main goal is to make the referendum fail.”

According to her team, payments began flowing through a sanctioned Russian bank, PSB, once the cash couriers were discovered at the airport and that route was made more difficult.

By early October, as many as 130,000 voters had received payments through this scheme – about 10% of the active electorate, according to police chief Viorel Cernauteanu.

“$15 million was transferred in September alone,” he told me, explaining how they were able to trace money and recipients as they provided personal information to open a bank account.

Offering money or goods in exchange for votes is a crime punishable by a prison sentence of five years. Last month, a new law also made it an administrative offense to accept money.

But in one of Europe’s poorest countries, it’s not difficult to find willing recipients of cash.