Romania’s anticorruption prosecutors have held 20 people in the file “bribes for driving licenses” and have demanded the preventive arrest for 16 of them.

Seven of them are police officers and work within the Directorate for Driving License and Vehicle Registration, reports local Mediafax.

The prosecutors are investigating 87 people in this file, including cops, driving instructors and people who paid bribes to pass the driving license tests. At least 100 people got their driving licenses by paying bribes, despite the fact that they were not yet ready to go out in traffic.

The bribes started at around EUR 300, of which the driving instructors took EUR 100 and the rest went to the police officers that made the evaluations.

The driving instructors and police officers who took bribes used a coded language to guarantee the confidentiality of communications. The driving trainees were called “potatoes,” “jeans”, or “wheel” whereas the money were “coco” or “iepuroi”. The last one referred to the euro and means rabbit in Romanian.

editor@romania-insider.com