Former tourism minister Elena Udrea received on Tuesday, June 24, approval for conditional release from the commission at the Târgșor women’s penitentiary, where she is incarcerated, News.ro reported.
Next, the court is scheduled to review the request for release later this week. If the judges accept the prison commission’s recommendation and gives Udrea the conditional release, and if there are no contestations in the 3 days following such a decision, the former minister will be set free.
On April 7, 2022, Elena Udrea was definitively sentenced to six years in prison for bribery and abuse of office in the Gala Bute case. However, she left the country before the sentence was pronounced. On the day of the sentence, she was declared wanted and caught on Bulgarian territory, at the Kulata border crossing, on the border with Greece.
She remained in preventive detention in Bulgaria until June 10, 2022, when the Bulgarian authorities definitively decided on her extradition, and she was brought to Romania on June 16, 2022.
After that, Elena Udrea filed an appeal following the conviction in the Gala Bute case, which was rejected by the High Court of Cassation and Justice on November 1, 2022. Other appeals were also rejected.
In recent weeks, however, Udrea, who has been in prison for almost 3 years now, took several steps to obtain her release. On Monday, June 23, she filed a case for conditional release with the Ploiești Court, resulting in a hearing being set on June 26.
Previously, she had also taken several legal steps, resulting in a reduction of her sentence by several months, with days served in detention in Costa Rica and Bulgaria being deducted from the six-year sentence, as well as a period of preventive arrest and house arrest served in another case in which Udrea was charged, according to News.ro.
(Photo source: Inquam Photos | Octav Ganea)
