Ten parties inspected by the AEP: 125,000 lei in fines, and half handed over no documents

The state has finished checking the accounts of ten small parties for 2025 and has drawn 125,000 lei in fines out of them, even though at half of those parties it never managed to see a single document. The ten reports appear one after another in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 903 of 29 October 2026, on pages 11-15, and they are the second series of this kind this autumn: the batch of six reports published on 18 September 2026 ended with no fine at all, with five parties out of six that had not handed over their documents. In the October batch, the same conduct has a price.

The inspection starts from art. 42 para. (1) of Law no. 334/2006 on the financing of the activity of political parties and of election campaigns, as republished, which entitles the Permanent Electoral Authority to check parties’ income and expenditure. Under the inspection plan for 2026, approved by the Authority’s president, the teams notified the parties in the spring and worked, on average, 54 days on each file, from 21 days at the Alliance of Young Democrats to 86 days at the Party for Odorheiu Secuiesc. The ten missions add up to 538 days of inspection for financial activity documented at 402.93 lei.

The mechanism that produces the fine is simple and has nothing to do with what the accounts might have shown. Art. 43 para. (4) of the law requires the party to produce to the Authority every document and piece of information requested within no more than 15 days of the request. If it fails to do so, it has already committed the administrative offence, and art. 52 para. (2) prices that at a fine of 15,000 to 50,000 lei. Four of the five parties that handed over nothing were fined on precisely this ground.

The ten reports, side by side

Added up, the fines come to 125,000 lei: 50,000 at the Merit Movement, 30,000 at the European Movement for Reconstruction, Initiative and Tradition and 15,000 each at the Conservative Right, the Farmers’ Party of Romania and the Alliance for Transparency and Unity. Five parties were fined, one received only a warning, and four came out with no penalty at all.

The warnings are not a goodwill gesture without a basis in law. Law no. 334/2006 does not provide for a warning in art. 52, where it lists the administrative offences, but art. 55 of the law refers to Government Ordinance no. 2/2001 on the legal regime of administrative offences, and that ordinance places the warning, in art. 5 para. (2), among the main penalties and, in art. 7 para. (3), leaves it applicable even where the act establishing the offence does not provide for it. Art. 7 para. (2) requires, for a warning, conduct of minor gravity.

What it changes in practice

For the five parties that were fined, the immediate effect is a debt to the state budget and a short deadline. The penalty is imposed by a decision of the Permanent Electoral Authority, under art. 54 para. (1) of Law no. 334/2006, and art. 54 para. (2) states that the decision may be challenged before the competent court. Since art. 55 completes the regime with Government Ordinance no. 2/2001, the deadline is the one in art. 31 para. (1) of the ordinance, 15 days from the handing over or communication of the act, and jurisdiction is the alternative one in art. 32 para. (1): the district court for the area where the offence was committed, or the one for the party’s registered office. Art. 32 para. (3) of the ordinance specifies that the complaint suspends enforcement.

If the 15 days pass without a complaint, the act becomes an enforceable title with no further formality, under art. 37 of the ordinance, and it is enforced, under art. 39 para. (3), on the terms laid down for tax claims. On top of this general mechanism, Law no. 334/2006 adds a lever of its own in art. 56 para. (1): within 30 days of the court judgment becoming final or of the expiry of the period for challenging the decision, amounts equal to the unpaid fines may be withheld from the monthly instalments of public funding, through garnishment. The Ministry of Finance tells the Authority which fines have gone unpaid.

The parties in this batch do not receive public funding, however, at least not according to the documents that were checked: none of the five files in which the accounts could be read shows any income from a state budget subsidy. For them, the lever in art. 56 para. (1) is empty, and recovery comes down to ordinary enforcement against entities with no documented assets.

A second effect, one the reports do not name, follows from art. 24 para. (1) of the same law: the state budget subsidy may be suspended temporarily, by decision of the Authority, among other things for breaching art. 3 para. (8) and art. 5 para. (4). Those are precisely the provisions breached by the Farmers’ Party of Romania and the Alliance of Young Democrats. A party that grows and comes to receive a subsidy therefore starts out with a finding that can freeze its money, and the period for putting matters right under art. 24 para. (3) is no more than 15 days.

For the five parties that handed over no documents, the effect that matters is that the 2025 financial year remains unchecked and, in practice, uncheckable: the limitation period for imposing penalties is 3 years from the commission of the act, under art. 52 para. (5), but no provision obliges a party to hand over retroactively the documents it failed to hand over in time. The fine punishes the refusal, not the lack of transparency behind it.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

The most visible change is the move from a warning to a fine. The batch of six reports published on 18 September 2026 had five parties out of six that had not handed over their documents and ended with no fine at all, only warnings. The batch of 29 October 2026 has five parties out of ten in the same position and draws 110,000 lei from the refusal to produce documents alone. Six weeks apart, the same conduct moves from minor gravity to the legal ceiling.

The second change is that the Authority has begun to use the whole range allowed by art. 52 para. (2), not just its lower end. The floor of 15,000 lei appears three times, the middle is taken by the 30,000 lei imposed on the European Movement for Reconstruction, Initiative and Tradition, and the ceiling of 50,000 lei is reached once, at the Merit Movement. For the same offence, art. 43 para. (4), the gap between the most and the least heavily penalised party is 35,000 lei, a ratio of 3.3 to 1, and the reports do not explain where it comes from.

The third difference concerns what is being checked. Until now, the public image of party financing controls was tied to election campaigns and to the large parties, with subsidies running into millions. The reports in this batch show the other end of the mechanism: parties that, taken together, moved less than 1,500 lei in 2025 and to which the state applies the same inspection regime, with the same scale of fines, designed for entities that handle public money.

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