The new Interior Minister Petre Toba, who has been the head of the Romanian Police in the last three years, has joined the list of officials who have been accused of plagiarism.

Some 250 of the total 390 pages of his PhD thesis have been copied from papers or reports posted on the internet without using quotation marks, according to an investigation carried out by the journalist Emilia Sercan of Pressone.ro.

The Interior Minister reacted by saying that he had worked at his PhD thesis in good faith, and that he wrote an applied paper based on his professional experience as the chief of police.

“If the verdict is plagiarism, there can be only one solution. We will see the verdict and then we’ll have the solution,” said the Government spokesman Dan Suciu.

Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos also said that he asked the Education Ministry to come up with an analysis on the plagiarism accusations against Toba, and that the integrity criterion remained an essential one for his Government.

editor@romania-insider.com

(photo source: gov.ro)