IAȘI, Romania — A court in Iași sentenced the former president of the Vaslui County Council to seven years in prison on Friday for taking kickbacks worth 4.1 million lei, about 820,000 euros, on road-paving contracts, closing a case that for five years had seemed a monument to the limits of Romania’s anti-corruption campaign.
Constantin Apostol, 61, who ran the county from 2008 to 2022 and was for most of that time the most powerful politician in one of the European Union’s poorest regions, was found guilty of bribery, abuse of office, and influence peddling. The court also ordered the confiscation of two apartments in Iași, a hunting lodge, and 1.2 million lei in cash found in a safe at his sister’s home. He was taken into custody in the courtroom.
Prosecutors from the National Anticorruption Directorate said Mr. Apostol demanded a 14 percent commission on 140 million lei in county road contracts awarded between 2019 and 2022, with the money routed through a consultancy owned by his nephew. Roads in Vaslui, they noted, were resurfaced on average every three years during the period, against a national norm of eight. “The asphalt was the thinnest in Romania and the invoices were the thickest,” the lead prosecutor, Mihaela Dumitrescu, told the court.
Mr. Apostol’s lawyer, Radu Constantinescu, said his client would appeal to the High Court of Cassation and Justice. He called the prosecution “political theater against a man who built more roads than any county president in the history of Moldavia,” using the name for Romania’s northeastern region.
The case had come to symbolize a retreat. Mr. Apostol was indicted in 2021, but the trial stalled for three years amid changes in the law on the statute of limitations that led to the dismissal of hundreds of corruption cases nationwide. It resumed only after the Constitutional Court narrowed the application of those changes in 2025. “For a while it looked as if the whole case would evaporate,” said Andrei Popescu of the Clean Vote Initiative, a Bucharest watchdog group that tracked the proceedings. “This verdict says the system can still finish what it starts. It took five years and a lot of luck.”
In Vaslui, reaction was muted. Unemployment in the county is twice the national average, and more than a third of its residents of working age have left for other E.U. countries. Ion Mardare, 54, who drives a minibus between Vaslui and Iași, said the roads were in fact better than they used to be. “Everybody knew what he was,” Mr. Mardare said. “They voted for him anyway, because before him there were no roads at all. Now there are roads and he is in prison. Maybe that is progress.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 2 of the European edition with the headline: Romanian Court Jails Former County Boss for 7 Years in Road-Contract Bribery Case.
