In a typical case, the first figure the person under investigation sees is not the penalty, but the loss (prejudiciu). An inspection report establishes 2.4 million lei, principal debt, interest and penalties combined. The referral repeats the figure, the indictment takes it over. Only at the hearing does someone ask the right question: which part of this figure is, in law, the loss? The answer decides whether an aggravating circumstance applies, whether the case belongs to the National Anti-corruption Directorate (DNA), and how many years are on the table.
The penalties in Legea nr. 241/2005 were amended by Legea nr. 126/2024 (Official Gazette No. 437 of 13 May 2024), applicable from 16 May 2024. The offences under Article 9(1)(a) to (i) are punishable, in their current form, by 3 to 10 years' imprisonment and a ban on certain rights, or by a fine.
The limits were increased from the earlier 2 to 8 years that applied before 16 May 2024. The fine remains an alternative, but it is rarely applied under Article 9, outside the case covered by Article 10(2). The offences, point by point, are covered in the article on the offences under Article 9.
Article 9(1), the basic form, with no increase. Limits: 3 to 10 years and a ban on certain rights, or a fine.
Article 9(2), the limits are increased by 3 years. Resulting limits: 6 to 13 years.
Article 9(3), the limits are increased by 5 years. Resulting limits: 8 to 15 years. The two paragraphs are not combined.
The thresholds are expressed in euro, “in the equivalent in national currency”. Above EUR 1,000,000, paragraph (3) applies, not paragraph (2) plus paragraph (3).
WARNING: the thresholds of EUR 100,000 and EUR 500,000 are the old version. If you have read somewhere that the thresholds are EUR 100,000 and EUR 500,000, with increases of 5 and 7 years respectively, you have read the earlier version (Legea nr. 50/2013), in force up to and including 15 May 2024. It has not disappeared from practice: for offences committed before 16 May 2024, the question of the more lenient criminal law (Article 5 of the Criminal Code) arises, and the result is not intuitive. For a loss of EUR 200,000, the old law gave 7 to 13 years (2 to 8, increased by 5), while the new law gives 3 to 10, the new law is clearly more favourable. Conversely, for EUR 60,000, the old law gave 2 to 8 years, the new one gives 3 to 10, the old law is more favourable. Note, however, that the more lenient law is determined as a whole, across all the relevant provisions, including Article 10, which was also rewritten, without combining the two laws into a third, hybrid one.
The argument is not a matter of preference but of the wording of the law: Article 10(1) refers to “the loss increased by 15% of its value, to which interest and penalties are added”. If the loss already included the accessory charges, adding them separately would make no sense. The same construction appears in paragraph (3).
It follows that the loss is the principal tax liability evaded, and the accessory charges are a separate addition. The consequence is direct: a total sum of 2.4 million lei, of which 1.5 million is principal debt and 0.9 million is accessory charges, means a loss of around EUR 300,000, not EUR 480,000, with consequences for the EUR 500,000 threshold, for the ceiling under Article 10, and for jurisdiction.
The second front concerns how the base is calculated: the tax authority's estimates, the refusal of deductions for genuine expenses, double-counting of the same transactions. A criminal loss is not taken mechanically from an inspection report: it has to be established in the criminal proceedings. How huge sums appear after an inspection and challenging a tax assessment decision are covered separately.
Legea nr. 126/2024 introduced, in Article 10(2), an obligation with major impact: “the loss shall be determined on the basis of a specialist expert report”, and “the suspect or defendant has the right to participate in carrying out the expert report” (Articles 172 to 180 of the Code of Criminal Procedure apply accordingly).
By Decision No. 430/2025, delivered on 15 December 2025 by the Panel for Resolving Points of Law in Criminal Matters of the High Court of Cassation and Justice (ÎCCJ), and published in Official Gazette No. 149 of 26 February 2026, it was held that the failure to prepare the specialist expert report renders the document referring the case to the court irregular, which results in the case being sent back to the prosecutor.
For the defence, this is one of the most important developments of recent years: an indictment that simply takes over the figure from the inspection report, with no expert report ordered during the criminal investigation, is vulnerable. And the right to participate in the expert report, with one's own objectives and a party-appointed tax expert, is the point at which the amount can actually be changed. How this works in practice is set out in the articles on the criminal investigation in tax cases and on the defence in the tax evasion (evaziune fiscală) case.
Within the time limit set in the inspection documents: 6 months to 5 years. The only offence in the law that can also be committed through negligence.
The unjustified refusal to present the legal documents and assets, within 15 days at most of a payment demand (somație), and obstructing the authorities from entering premises or land, are each punishable by 1 to 6 years.
Withholding and failing to pay, or collecting and failing to pay, within 60 days at most of the due date, taxes and contributions listed in the annex to the law: 1 to 5 years, or a fine. Since 2024, failing to withhold them in the first place is also criminalised separately. (Article 6 was repealed following Constitutional Court Decision No. 363/2015.)
Holding or putting them into circulation without authorisation: 1 to 5 years; for counterfeit ones: 2 to 7 years.
Establishing taxes in bad faith, resulting in refunds, repayments or offsets that were not due: 3 to 10 years, or a fine; association for this purpose: 5 to 15 years. An attempt is punishable.
Fraudulent VAT schemes: cross-border, at EUR 10,000,000 or more from the EU budget; since 2024, at EUR 1,000,000 or more from the state budget, both punishable by 7 to 15 years. Article 9³ (2024): an individual crediting the company with money derived from the failure to record transactions or income, 3 to 10 years, or a fine.
Legea nr. 126/2024 also changed jurisdiction. Under Article 13(3¹) of O.U.G. nr. 43/2002, the offences under Articles 8, 9 and 9² of Legea nr. 241/2005 fall within the jurisdiction of the National Anti-corruption Directorate (DNA), regardless of the person's status, if the case, regardless of the number of concurrent offences, involves damage of more than 10 million lei.
Note the unit: the threshold is in lei, not euro, a frequent confusion in the press. However, Article II of the same law introduced an identically worded provision into O.U.G. nr. 78/2016, giving the same offences, at the same threshold, to the Directorate for Investigating Organised Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) as well. The overlap was criticised in legal commentary from the moment it was adopted and remains a source of jurisdictional conflicts, and therefore a ground for the defence, since a criminal investigation carried out by a body lacking subject-matter jurisdiction results in absolute nullity. Cases registered with the ordinary prosecutor's offices before 16 May 2024 remain with them, regardless of the amount involved.
Where offences are concurrent, Article 39(1)(b) of the Criminal Code imposes the heaviest penalty, plus a mandatory increase of one third of the total of the others, a mechanism that can quickly exceed the special maximum for the principal offence.
Evasion and forgery. By Decision No. 21/2017 (appeal in the interest of the law, Official Gazette No. 1024 of 27 December 2017), the High Court held that using falsified invoices and receipts in the name of “shell” companies, to record expenses without real transactions, constitutes tax evasion under Article 9(1)(c), without separately charging forgery of a private document and use of a forged document. Charges that add forgery as a concurrent offence here should be challenged.
Evasion and money laundering. Charging money laundering as a concurrent offence is common, particularly as “self-laundering”, and raises real problems of overlap between the material acts and confiscation. A useful reference point: by Decision No. 23/2017 (Official Gazette No. 878 of 8 November 2017), the High Court held that, where tax evasion and money laundering are concurrent, the special confiscation of sums that were the object of the laundering and originate from the evasion is not ordered at the same time as the obligation to pay the sums representing tax liabilities owed to the state, the two measures have distinct grounds and purposes, and combining them would amount to double recovery.
Note also Article 11: for the offences under this law, taking precautionary measures is mandatory, precautionary seizure (sechestru asigurător) is not an option for the prosecutor, but a legal obligation.
Alongside imprisonment, Article 9 provides for a ban on certain rights, most often the right to hold an office or carry on the activity that the offender used to commit the offence (Article 66 of the Criminal Code), for 1 to 5 years. Separately, Article 12 provides for a statutory disqualification: persons convicted of offences under this law cannot be founders, directors, managers or legal representatives of a company; the final judgment is communicated to the trade registry (registrul comerțului). For an entrepreneur, this is often the most lasting consequence.
The company is criminally liable alongside the individual, not instead of them, for offences committed in carrying out its business, or in its interest or in its name (Article 135 of the Criminal Code). The principal penalty is a fine, calculated in day-fines (Article 137). However, additional penalties can effectively bring the business to a halt: dissolution, suspension of activity, a ban on participating in public procurement, publication of the judgment (Article 136).
Article 80 of the Criminal Code allows this only where the penalty provided by law is imprisonment of 5 years at most; Article 9 provides for 10.
Article 83 makes this conditional on a penalty provided by law of less than 7 years, which is out of reach under Article 9, just as it was before 2024, when the maximum was 8 years.
This depends on the penalty actually imposed: Article 91 allows it where that penalty, including where offences are concurrent, is 3 years at most, the convicted person has not previously been sentenced to more than 1 year's imprisonment, and they agree to unpaid community work.
In practice, under Article 9(1), suspension requires bringing the sentence down to the 3 year minimum or below it, through mitigating circumstances (Articles 75 to 76 of the Criminal Code) or, above all, through the reduction under Article 10(2). Under the aggravating circumstances in paragraphs (2) and (3), where the minimum rises to 6 and 8 years respectively, suspension becomes out of reach without a statutory ground for reduction.
Article 10(2) provides: where the loss is covered in full, through actual payment, by the first hearing, the limits are reduced by half; and if the loss recovered in this way is up to and including EUR 1,000,000, a fine can be applied instead. If payment takes place after the first hearing but before a final judgment, the limits are reduced by one third.
This benefit applies to all defendants, even those who did not contribute to the payment (paragraph (4)), but not to someone who has committed another offence under the same law in the previous 5 years (paragraph (6)). In numbers, under Article 9(1), the reduction by half turns 3 to 10 years into 1 year and 6 months to 5 years, which realistically opens the way to suspension under supervision. Separately, there are the grounds for non-punishment under Article 10(1) and (3), covered in the article on making good the loss, and the reduction by half of the limits for someone who reports the offence and enables the participants to be held liable (paragraph (5)).
Limitation. Under Article 154 of the Criminal Code, the general term is 8 years for offences punishable by imprisonment of more than 5 years but not exceeding 10, the case of Article 9(1), and 10 years for those punishable by imprisonment of between 10 and 20 years, as with the aggravated forms. The special limitation period arises once the term has been exceeded by the same length again (Article 155(4)): 16 and 20 years respectively. A technical point deserves to be raised explicitly: whether the aggravating circumstances in paragraphs (2) and (3) are classified as aggravated variants or as mere grounds for increase within the meaning of Article 187 of the Criminal Code moves the term from 8 to 10 years. On top of this comes Article 10¹, introduced in 2024: the term runs “from the date the tax authority is notified or the date the criminal investigation body is notified, but no later than 10 years from the date the offence was committed”. Being a stricter rule, it does not apply to offences committed before 16 May 2024.
Decisively. Article 10 treats the accessory charges as an addition distinct from the loss, which supports the view that the loss is the principal debt evaded. If part of the EUR 600,000 represents interest and penalties, the figure may fall below the EUR 500,000 threshold, making the aggravating circumstance under Article 9(2) inapplicable. The amount is established through an expert report, not by taking over the figure from the inspection report.
Not necessarily. The DNA's jurisdiction is triggered by damage of more than 10 million lei, not euro. In addition, cases that were already before the ordinary prosecutor's offices before Legea nr. 126/2024 remain there, regardless of the amount.
No. The reduction of the limits by half is mandatory, but the fine is optional (“may be applied”), and only where the loss recovered is up to and including EUR 1,000,000. The court can still impose imprisonment, within the reduced limits.
Yes, dissolution is one of the additional penalties applicable to a company (Article 136 of the Criminal Code), alongside suspension of activity or a ban on participating in public procurement. It is a measure of last resort, but the risk is real, and the company's liability does not rule out the director's: the two are cumulative.
Informative material, updated on 18 July 2026. It does not constitute legal or tax advice; individual situations must be assessed on their own facts. The presumption of innocence applies until a final judgment.
If the matter involves a criminal complaint or an open file, the related analyses are grouped under economic criminal law. For how the defence is built, see tax evasion defence.
Time limits run from the date of communication. A first conversation clarifies what is being alleged, what you need to substantiate and how the defence is built, before an estimate becomes a tax assessment decision.