Justice minister Tudorel Toader said yesterday that he would publish this Thursday the list of people who visited the archive of the Justice Ministry’s secret service -SIPA.

Moreover, the public will find out whether some people entered the archive by themselves or if they came in a team.

“I know who entered,” said Toader. “I didn’t even go into the halls of the archive. (...) First step, I repeat: name, surname and number of visits, date, time and minute,” he added.

The audience will thus find out who are “the depositories of the information in the archive”, according to the minister.

SIPA is a secret service that used to operate under the Justice Ministry’s authority and was disbanded in 2006.

An article by the controversial journalist Dan Andronic, a man investigated in several corruption cases with many connections to politicians, has sparked the scandal related to SIPA. He wrote that when the service was disbanded in 2006, following a decision of former justice minister Monica Macovei, the people in charge of securing the service’s archives made copies of some sensitive documents. SIPA’s files included sensitive information about some judges in Romania, information that may have later been used to pressure these judges into ruling convictions in corruption cases.

The new scandal is aimed at casting new doubts over the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA).

editor@romania-insider.com