A Masonic temple brought together bribing brothers.
As do around five million other people worldwide, Judge Cătălin Nicolae Șerban of Romania enjoys the fellowship and business opportunities that come with membership in a Masonic lodge. But that fellowship proved to be the judge’s downfall.
"I'm proud I'm a Freemason. Our meetings take place in daylight and they are for knowledge," Șerban said last December in the Alba Iulia Court of Appeal.
Nine days later, in that same court, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for taking a bribe from a Masonic brother. After appeal, he was sentenced to five years in prison.
The judge was caught red-handed in a sting operation put together by Romanian authorities. Authorities were monitoring representatives of Mineco, a Swiss-based firm seeking to control the Romanian state-owned company Moldomin which had rights to about US$1billion worth of copper reserves in southwest Romania.
The Court also sentenced Iacob Chișărău, the former director of y Moldomin, to three years in jail for delivering a €50,000 bribe to the judge’s wife.
Chișărău and Șerban are brothers in the same Masonic lodge. According to court documents, Chișărău used the connection as a conduit for business, initially approaching the judge as a fellow Mason.
At the hearings, Chișărău said he knew Judge Șerban from their Masonic lodge in Reșița. He claimed he met the judge in a bar in Timișoara, about a month before the prosecutors' action, and asked the judge to help him thwart a suit by the Romanian state that would stop Mineco from taking over Moldomin’s assets. Another freemason from the same lodge, Marian Ioan Mihăilă, a professor at the University of Reșița and a former officer in Romanian intelligence, was also present at that meeting.
Mihăilă was given a three years suspended sentence on charges that he was complicit to influence peddling. He claimed in front of the prosecutors that initially the judge thought Chișărău wanted to meet him for another case in which Chișărău was accused of killing three young people in a car accident, in May 2011.
However, Chișărău told the judge that they needed to talk about a different case: Mineco’s case that was to be tried in the Timișoara Court of Appeal, where Șerban was the vice president of the court.