Fines for illicit trading stay abolished: CCR rejects the ANAF challenge

For five years, the National Agency for Fiscal Administration tried, in thirteen cases opened across the country, to convince the Constitutional Court that the law which abolished the penalties for illicit trading had been adopted improperly. Decision no. 488 of 21 October 2025, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 576 of 14 July 2026, closes the matter: the repeal stands. This is the second time this year that the Court has confirmed the penalty framework in the trade area, after the ruling by which the fine for obstructing an ANPC inspection remained valid.

The story begins in 2020. Parliament adopted Law No 222/2020, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 1018 of 2 November 2020, whose Article I states, in a single sentence, that Law No 12/1990 is repealed. Overnight, an entire chapter of penalties applied by anti-fraud inspectors, by the police and by town halls disappeared from the statute book.

ANAF raised the plea of unconstitutionality in cases pending before the district and county courts of Arad, Vrancea, Brăila, Suceava and Constanța, all of them appeals against penalty notices. The agency’s argument did not concern the substance, but the way the legislation had been made: the explanatory memorandum spoke about removing the red tape around trade mark-ups, not about scrapping the whole law, an impact assessment was missing, and the Legislative Council had suggested moving the remaining administrative offences into Government Ordinance no. 21/1992, which happened only in part.

The consumer protection law under which ANPC operates also gains, from 4 October 2026, a new compulsory notice at the commissariats and next to the tills, carrying the single complaints number.

What it changes in practice

The first effect is that the text stays in force and the courts can no longer stay proceedings while waiting for an answer from the Constitutional Court. The decision is final and generally binding, so it applies to every case, not only to the thirteen that were joined.

The second effect concerns traders fined under Law No 12/1990 before November 2020 whose appeals were still pending. The more lenient administrative-offence law applies to ongoing proceedings as well, and here the new law abolished the conduct as an offence altogether, so the penalty no longer has any legal basis.

The third effect is the confirmation of a line of case law that the Court has been repeating for years: the explanatory memorandum and the impact assessment have no constitutional value. The Court says explicitly that it has no power to review the way explanatory memoranda are drafted and that, once the law is adopted, their role is reduced to helping the reader understand it.

The fourth effect is a practical one for the enforcement bodies: the only instrument left from the old law is the ban on trading in goods whose origin is not proven, and that now works under the consumer protection rules, with ANPC inspectors in the front line, rather than under the rules of anti-fraud inspection.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

Until November 2020, Law No 12/1990 listed eleven types of conduct as administrative offences: trading without meeting the legal conditions, itinerant selling in places other than those authorised, tying the sale of one good to the purchase of another, selling products past their expiry date or with no expiry date displayed, trading in goods without documents of origin, failing to declare trade mark-ups to the tax authorities, failing to display prices and tariffs, unjustified refusal to sell, hoarding goods in order to create a shortage, exceeding the maximum mark-ups set by Government decision, and counterfeiting or substituting goods.

Fines ranged from 500 to 5,000 lei for individuals and from 2,000 to 20,000 lei for companies. The harshest provision, though, was Article 3: the goods used to commit the offence, where they belonged to the offender, plus the sums of money and the goods obtained through the offence were confiscated. The offences were established by town hall officials, the General Directorate for Tax Anti-Fraud, the financial control bodies, the Romanian Police, the Gendarmerie and the Border Police.

From 5 November 2020, all of this disappeared. Law No 222/2020 kept a single rule and moved it elsewhere: a new paragraph was inserted into Article 4 of Government Ordinance no. 21/1992, prohibiting the marketing of products or the provision of services that do not meet the conditions laid down by law, as well as trading in goods whose origin is not proven. The definition of documents of origin was taken over word for word from the old law: tax invoice, invoice, goods dispatch note, customs documents, foreign invoice.

The penalty for breaching the new prohibition is a fine of 2,000 to 20,000 lei, under Article 50(1)(c) of the same ordinance. Automatic confiscation was not carried over. The other ten administrative offences were not moved anywhere.

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