We have argued in previous posts that a Romanian deferred prosecution mechanism is not merely a matter of doing justice better; it is a matter of competition and economics.
A company operating in Paris, London, or New York can self-report misconduct, remediate, pay, and move on with its business - without being excluded, among other consequences, from public procurement. The same company's Romanian subsidiary faces only one path: years of investigation, frozen assets, and an uncertain outcome. That asymmetry may shape where multinationals invest, how they structure compliance, and which jurisdictions they treat as manageable risk. Legal certainty in enforcement, too, is an economic asset.
The National Anticorruption Directorate's 2025 activity report, published this January, now supplies the domestic evidence. Four numbers should reframe the debate.
Negotiated resolution is already predominant
In 2025, the Directorate concluded 253 guilty plea agreements against just 114 indictments - 69% of all cases sent to court were resolved by agreement, and courts rejected only 0.8% of them. Romanian criminal justice demonstrably accommodates negotiated outcomes.
What it lacks is a pre-charge, corporate-facing instrument: the plea agreement under Article 478 of the Code of Criminal Procedure arrives after the damage of a full investigation is done, offers no self-reporting incentive, and extracts no compliance commitments.
Corporate sanctions carry little deterrent weight
Of 329 defendants convicted with final judgments, only 17 - 5.17% - received custodial sentences; 82% received suspended sentences. The five legal persons convicted for fraud against the European Union's financial interests received fines between 7,000 and 20,500 lei. That is under EUR 4,100 for defrauding the Union budget.
Directive (EU) 2026/1021 will require turnover-based penalties by June 2028. The distance between current practice and that standard is massive.
Duration remains the system's failure
44% of defendants judged definitively in 2025 endured proceedings exceeding five years. The longest ran 16 years. Investigations exceeded three years in 46% of cases - a figure that actually worsened year on year.
Recovery is the most striking gap
Courts ordered confiscation and damages of 301.6 million lei in 2025. The amount effectively recovered was 657,645 lei. That is an effective recovery rate of roughly 0.2%. The report itself concedes that execution "will remain the main challenge".
The system is improving - the acquittal rate fell from 21.52% to 9.59%, restitutions dropped to 1.63%. But better indictments do not shorten a 16-year process, do not collect the 99.8% of ordered sums that go unrecovered, and, most importantly, do not give a company any reason to self-report, remediate, and pay before charges are filed, ultimately affecting long-term economic interests.
The legislative moment
A Romanian deferred prosecution framework - court-supervised, with monetary penalties calibrated to turnover, and monitored compliance undertakings - would address all four failures simultaneously. The example of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France is clear. The 2028 transposition deadline of the Anti-Bribery Directive is the moment to legislate the answer.