The University of Bucharest has asked the National Ethics Council to verify the PhD thesis which Lia Olguta Vasilescu, mayor of Craiova city in Romania, presented in 2007 at the Faculty of Sociology. The politician is being suspected of plagiarism as many of the passages in her thesis are not assigned and chapter seven is entirely copied, reports local Mediafax.

“The University’s Ethics Commission discussed this case in 2013, but it was not able, for objective reasons, to give a ruling at that time,” the University of Bucharest says in the notification recently sent to the National Ethics Council.

The Commission said it had requested an expert report on the suspicion of plagiarism in the case of Olguta Vasilescu’s thesis.

Vasilescu was elected mayor of Craiova in 2012. She is also a member of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), led by PM Victor Ponta, who was also accused of plagiarism.

Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta recently decided to give up its PhD in Law, which he got in 2003 from the University of Bucharest, due to plagiarism allegations.

Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com