Six parties inspected by the AEP: five were left unchecked, the sixth collected 2,521 lei in 2025

The Permanent Electoral Authority published on 18 September 2026 the results of six inspections carried out at political parties for the 2025 financial year, and at five of them it managed to check nothing at all. The six reports take up three pages of issue no. 794 of the Official Gazette of Romania and are all extracts, the short form the law requires to be published. Four days earlier the same institution had published eleven inspection reports on eleven small parties, so within five days seventeen inspections became public. The difference between the two batches is not their size but what came out of them: here, only one party opened its books.

This kind of inspection does not start from a complaint. Article 44(1) of Law no. 334/2006 requires the authority to check every year, at every party, that the rules on income and expenditure have been observed. The parties in this batch were entered in the inspection plan for 2026, approved by the president of the institution, and each mission started from a written notice sent 15 days in advance, under Article 47(4) of the implementing rules approved by Government Decision no. 10/2016. From the date of the request, the party has at most 15 days to hand over the documents, a period written into Article 43(4) of the law. If it does not hand them over, the inspection team has no way of finding anything out: Article 42(5) limits its requests strictly to the activities concerning the obtaining of income and the making of expenditure.

Here is what each of the six inspections found. The dates and the amounts are those in the reports.

Only one inspection ran its course. Partidul Național Român handed over the documents, had its own accounts organised in 2025 and closed the year with 2,521.00 lei in income, all from donations, and 2,521.00 lei in expenditure. Income and expenditure match to the leu, and the report says neither how much the party had in its account on 1 January 2025 nor how much was left on 31 December. To see the order of magnitude: 2,521 lei is 62% of a single month’s national minimum gross basic salary in 2025, which stood at 4,050 lei.

The report on Partidul Sebeșul Verde is the hardest to read. A founding member told the inspection team that the person who had looked after running the party had died on 18 January 2026, that the party no longer has anyone designated as president and that he himself has nothing further to do with it. The documents requested by Notice no. 7.087 of 5 May 2026 never reached the team, and the report ends with a phrase rarely seen in an administrative act: the check „was not carried out”. The calendar completes the story: the death occurred 18 days after the end of the year under review and 102 days before 30 April 2026, the day on which the party was due to file the detailed report of its income and expenditure for 2025. The notice went out on 5 May, 107 days after the death, and the mission took place on 3 July, 59 days after the notice, almost four times the 15-day period the law gives the party to reply.

At Partidul Alianța Moților Uniți, the inspection team walked in and found a void. The president and the vice-president had resigned, the party was left represented only by its secretary general, and as at 31 December 2025 it had no accounts organised, had had no financial or accounting activity and had no bank account either. Article 3(8) of Law no. 334/2006 requires every party to organise its own accounts, with no exemption for parties that have no activity. The report records the fact, then moves to the next section with a single sentence: „No penalties were applied.”

The report on Partidul Mișcarea Iubim România has two sentences of findings and then stops. The party did not hand over the documents requested by notice and has no tax identification code allocated, which means it can neither lawfully open a bank account nor keep accounts. The published text has no penalties section, not even an empty one, and the findings are not numbered, although the other five reports in the same issue have both „I. Findings” and „II. Penalties applied”.

The other two refusals drew a warning. Partidul Alianța Națională pentru Demnitatea României did not hand over all the documents and was penalised for breaching Article 43(4) and Article 49(1). Partidul Polul Suveranist handed over none of them and was penalised for the same two provisions, plus Article 49(3). The warning does not appear among the penalties listed in Article 52 of the law, which for these very acts provides for a fine of 15,000 to 50,000 lei. It gets there through Article 55, which completes the regime with Government Ordinance no. 2/2001, and Article 7(2) of that ordinance reserves it for acts „of minor gravity”.

On public money the reports are silent, and there is a reason. The subsidy from the state budget is shared out according to the number of votes obtained at the general elections for the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate and at the elections for the local public administration authorities, under Article 18(3), and none of the six parties appears with a single leu from that source. Where the subsidy exists, the control is double: Article 42(2) gives it to the Court of Accounts as well. For the parties in this batch the second control has nothing to work on, and the statutory audit required by Article 45 passes them by for the same reason.

What it changes in practice

Publication in the Official Gazette of Romania does not, in itself, apply any penalty. Administrative offences are established by representatives of the authority, and the penalty is applied by decision of the Permanent Electoral Authority, under Article 54(1). The decision may be challenged before the competent court, under paragraph (2) of the same article. The warnings are therefore challengeable acts, even if they cost nothing: they stay on the institution’s record and weigh at the next inspection.

For the four parties left without a penalty, publication does not close the file. The application of penalties becomes time-barred three years from the date of the act, under Article 52(5), and for continuing offences the period runs from the moment the act ceases, under paragraph (6). A party that failed to file its 2025 report by 30 April 2026 can be penalised for that until 30 April 2029.

For money received unlawfully, the recovery mechanism exists but needs figures. Article 53(1) says that the party penalised pays into the state budget the sums of money and the value of the goods and services „which formed the subject matter of the administrative offence”. Where the offence is the refusal to show the documents, there is no sum forming its subject matter, so nothing is recovered. In this batch not one leu went back to the budget, and the only income found, the 2,521 lei from donations, was lawful.

For a reader who is not a member of any of the six parties, the effect is informational, and the information is unwelcome. The state went to six parties to count the money and came back with one figure. What happened to the money of the other five in 2025 cannot be learned from the reports, or from anywhere else, because not even the annual report the parties file themselves has been checked by anyone.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

In law nothing changed between the two batches. Law no. 334/2006 and the 2016 rules are the same on 14 and on 18 September 2026. What changed is what reaches the reader.

The way the reports are split across issues is the most visible change. The numbers in issue no. 794 run from 12.172 to 13.926, and those in issue no. 776, published four days earlier, from 11.041 to 13.160. The ranges overlap over almost their whole length, so the batches do not go to publication in order. Two examples settle the point. Report no. 12.172 and report no. 12.180 are both signed in Bucharest on 14 July 2026, but the first came out on 18 September and the second on 14 September, so the one with the lower number came out second. Likewise, reports no. 13.010 and no. 13.011 have consecutive numbers and the same date, 29 July 2026, and were published in different issues, four days apart.

The content has thinned out as well. In the 14 September batch, most reports showed income broken down by source, membership fees, donations, bank interest, and the totals could be added up. In this batch, five reports out of six have no figure at all, and the sixth has a donations total with no breakdown. A reader wanting to compare the 2025 of these six parties with the previous year has nowhere to start.

What has not changed is the delay. The 45-day period from the carrying out of the inspection, written into Article 44(6) of the law and repeated in Article 50(1) of the rules, was exceeded for all six reports, by 15 to 32 days. The oldest inspection, the one at Sebeșul Verde, took place on 3 July 2026, so the period expired on 17 August, and publication came on 18 September.

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