In a first consultation on an embezzlement case, two questions come up almost every time, in the same order: “isn't it time-barred?” and “if I pay, does it end?”. They are good questions, because their answers decide, more than any plea, what the next few years look like. They are also questions frequently answered wrongly: limitation in embezzlement does not have a single term but three, and repayment does not produce, in this area, the effect that many assume by analogy with tax evasion.
The terms in Article 154(1) of the Criminal Code are calculated on the sentence provided by law for the offence committed, in the specific form found. Embezzlement produces three different terms, and the difference between 5 and 10 years, within the same statutory text, is why the classification is not an academic question.
Article 295: sentence of 2 to 7 years. Being more than 5 years and at most 10 years, point (c): 8 years applies (Article 154(1)).
Article 295 read together with Article 308: the limits are reduced by one third, resulting in one year and 4 months to 4 years and 8 months. Point (d): 5 years applies. This solution was established expressly by ÎCCJ Decision no. 1 of 19 January 2015, which settled that Article 308 is a mitigated variant, not a mere ground for reducing the sentence, which is why the reduced limits are taken into account for limitation. This is the term that applies to the great majority of private-sector cases, an underused fact in the defence.
Article 295 read together with Article 309, when the loss exceeds 2,000,000 lei (Article 183): the limits are increased by half, resulting in 3 years to 10 years and 6 months. Being more than 10 years, point (b): 10 years applies (Article 154(1)).
The threshold that moves a case from the second bracket to the third is dealt with in the analysis on calculating the loss and the statutory interest, and the forms of the offence, in the one on the forms of embezzlement, Articles 295, 308 and 309. The presumption of innocence applies, until a final judgment, to any person under investigation.
The rule is simple: the term runs from the date the offence was committed. The complication arises with the forms of legal unity, and that is where most limitation defences are quietly lost.
For a continued offence, several acts each fulfilling the elements of the same offence, committed pursuant to the same criminal resolution, the term runs from the date of the last act. For a continuing offence, from the date the conduct ceases.
This is where the trap lies. A director who made undocumented withdrawals between 2016 and 2024 may believe the 2016 acts are long since time-barred. If the prosecution treats it as a continued offence, the term does not run separately for each withdrawal, but from the last one, so only from 2024. All the individual acts fall within the same term.
From this comes a line of defence with a direct effect: challenging the unity of criminal resolution. If the withdrawals were separate decisions, made in different contexts, years apart, without a single plan, there is no continued offence, but a concurrence of offences, and limitation is calculated separately for each act. In a case with facts spread over eight years, the distinction can wipe out half the charges. The mechanics of successive withdrawals are described in the analysis on repeated cash withdrawals, and the rest of the defences, in the one on defences in embezzlement cases.
NOTE: Limitation is not found automatically, effortlessly, of the court's own motion. It must be raised, with a written calculation, act by act: the date of each act, the classification applied, the applicable term, the interrupting acts and their dates, the periods neutralised. A one-page calculation, filed at the first hearing, can be worth more than the entire closing argument on the merits.
This is the most complicated area in Romanian criminal law of the last decade. The sequence matters, because each stage left its own effect.
The Constitutional Court found the legislative solution in Article 155(1) of the Criminal Code, which provided for interruption by “any procedural act”, to be unconstitutional, considering the rule unforeseeable.
The legislature did not intervene. On 26 May 2022, the Court found that, in the absence of legislative action, the text no longer provided for any case of interruption of the limitation period.
Reintroduced, from 30 May 2022, the cases of interruption. The interval left uncovered: 25 June 2018 to 30 May 2022.
In an appeal in the interest of the law, the supreme court held that the rules on interrupting limitation are rules of substantive criminal law, subject to the principle of the more lenient criminal law (Article 5 of the Criminal Code), so the more favourable regime also applies to earlier acts.
The European corrective, and its limits. By its judgment of 24 July 2023 in case C-107/23 PPU (Lin), the Court of Justice of the European Union held that national courts are not obliged to disapply CCR Decisions no. 297/2018 and no. 358/2022, even though they lead to the closure of a significant number of cases, but that, in cases concerning serious fraud affecting the European Union's financial interests, they must disapply the national standard of the more lenient criminal law resulting from ÎCCJ Decision no. 67/2022.
The dispute continued. In a new judgment, delivered on 16 July 2026, the Court of Justice reaffirmed and refined this line: Romanian courts cannot apply the supreme court's interpretation on limitation where it creates a systemic risk of impunity for serious fraud affecting the Union's financial interests; in the absence of a national threshold of its own, fraud must be treated as serious where its total value exceeds EUR 50,000, even if the loss actually borne by the Union budget is smaller. The Court also confirmed that the principle of the more lenient criminal law does not, in itself, conflict with EU law, that res judicata must be respected, closed final cases are not reopened, but that judgments challenged by an appeal on points of law do not, in principle, benefit from that protection.
What this actually means for an embezzlement case. The European exception concerns exclusively cases affecting the Union's financial interests. An embezzlement case from a private company, with no EU funds and no such effect, remains under the domestic regime, and so benefits fully from the effect of the Constitutional Court's decisions and of ÎCCJ Decision no. 67/2022. A case where the sums come from EU funds, or which has a VAT component within the scope of the Union's financial interests, may fall within the exception if the total value exceeds the EUR 50,000 threshold. This is, as of 18 July 2026, the dividing line, and it must be checked at the start of the case, not on appeal.
Special limitation (Article 155(4) of the Criminal Code): the terms in Article 154, if exceeded by a further period equal to their own length, are treated as complete regardless of how many interruptions occurred. In practice: 10 years for the Article 308 form, 16 years for the basic form, 20 years for the aggravated form. This is the absolute ceiling, beyond which no procedural activity matters any more.
Limitation of the enforcement of the sentence (Article 162 of the Criminal Code) is a separate institution, running from the date the judgment becomes final: 5 years plus the length of the sentence to be served, but not more than 15 years, for prison sentences; 3 years for fines. It does not extinguish the conviction and does not clear the criminal record, it only removes enforcement. The parallel regime in tax matters, with its own terms and logic, is described in the analysis on limitation in tax matters.
This is the most important thing to say clearly, because the analogy with tax evasion is misleading. For tax evasion, Legea nr. 241/2005, as amended by Legea nr. 126/2024, provides express grounds for non-punishment, conditional on paying the full increased loss, within the time limits and stages set by law. For embezzlement there is no equivalent provision: covering the loss does not remove criminal liability, and its effect is that of the judicial mitigating circumstance under Article 75(2)(a) of the Criminal Code, discretionary, with a one-third reduction of the special limits (Article 76). The full comparison is in the analysis on the effects of covering the loss.
The most valuable moment. It is no longer just a mitigating factor: it becomes an argument going to the elements of the offence, evidence that there was no intent to permanently misappropriate, but at most a temporary use.
It remains a solid mitigating factor and supports applications to lift or narrow the seizure. It no longer, however, proves the absence of intent.
It is generally still treated as a mitigating factor, though with less weight. The later it is, the less convincing.
Its value is predominantly civil; the criminal effect is marginal.
Who can pay. Payment can be made by anyone, even a third party, a spouse, a parent, a shareholder, even the company itself. The rules of the Civil Code do not require payment to be made personally by the debtor. What matters is that the payment be documented and correctly attributed: a payment order with a clear explanation, referring to the case and the purpose of the payment, and written confirmation from the company. A payment made “by hand”, without a document, does not legally exist.
On the civil side, full repayment leads to the civil claim being dismissed as devoid of purpose, or to a corresponding reduction of the damages. Watch out, though, for ancillary amounts: following ÎCCJ Decision (RIL) no. 3 of 23 February 2026, statutory default interest runs from the date the loss occurred, so paying the principal debt does not automatically extinguish the whole claim.
The precautionary seizure is imposed, under Article 249 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, for several purposes: compensating the loss, guaranteeing the fine and the court costs, but also for property liable to special or extended confiscation. Repaying the loss removes one of these purposes, not all of them. That is why an application to lift the seizure must target exactly the ground that has disappeared, and must show that the seizure now exceeds the value that remains justified.
Two procedural levers: a challenge to the precautionary measure (Article 250 of the Code of Criminal Procedure) and the periodic review under Article 250² of the Code of Criminal Procedure, introduced by Legea nr. 6/2021, under which, throughout the criminal proceedings, the judicial body periodically checks, at intervals of no more than 6 months during the investigation and one year during the trial, whether the grounds for the measure still exist, ordering that it be maintained, narrowed, extended or lifted. The full mechanism, with the time limits for challenging it, is in the analysis on challenging and lifting the seizure.
Here there is a legal reality that many ignore, including, sometimes, those who should be relying on it. A conviction for embezzlement does not, by itself, bar someone from being a founder or director.
Article 6(2) of Legea nr. 31/1990, as it now reads following the amendment made by Legea nr. 162/2019, no longer provides for an automatic bar for those convicted. The current text covers persons who have been barred, by a final court judgment, from acting as a founder, as a supplementary penalty for a conviction for offences against property involving breach of trust, corruption, embezzlement, forgery of documents, tax evasion or money laundering offences, as well as for the offences under the Companies Law. Through Article 73¹ of the same law, the rule applies equally to directors, managers, members of the supervisory board and of the board of directors, censors and financial auditors.
The consequence: the bar operates only if the court has expressly imposed the supplementary penalty. This is a point that deserves the closest attention in submissions on sentencing, because it is there, and not in the text of Legea nr. 31/1990, that the client's professional future is decided.
Rehabilitation wipes out the consequences of the conviction. It occurs automatically (Article 165 of the Criminal Code) for a fine, for imprisonment of at most 2 years, or for a sentence with suspension under supervision, if within 3 years the convicted person has not committed another offence. Otherwise, it is judicial (Article 166), with terms of 4 years (imprisonment between 2 and 5 years), 5 years (between 5 and 10 years) and 7 years (over 10 years), calculated from when the sentence was served.
The condition in Article 168(b) of the Criminal Code closes the circle with the theme of repayment: judicial rehabilitation is granted only if the convicted person has paid in full the court costs and has fulfilled the civil obligations set out in the judgment, unless they prove they were unable to do so or the injured party waived the damages. In other words: an unpaid loss blocks not only the present, but also rehabilitation.
Under Article 135 of the Criminal Code, a legal person is criminally liable for offences committed in carrying out its object of activity or in its interest or in its name. In embezzlement, the company is the injured party, it cannot be liable for an act directed against its own assets.
The position changes, however, if a second company appears in the case, through which the funds were channelled: that company can be investigated for money laundering, with consequences that include a fine, dissolution or a bar from participating in public procurement. When and how this charge gets added, in the analysis on embezzlement and money laundering.
It depends on the classification and on how the acts are treated. In the private-sector form (Article 295 read with Article 308), the term is 5 years; in the basic form, 8 years; in the aggravated form, 10 years. If, however, the prosecution treats it as a continued offence that ended in 2023, the term runs from 2023 for all the individual acts. The calculation is made act by act, not “per case”.
Yes, more than any later repayment. Repayment made before any complaint or inspection is not just a mitigating factor: it supports the argument that there was no intent to permanently misappropriate, that is, it attacks a constituent element of the offence. It does not, however, guarantee a decision not to prosecute.
Yes. Payment can be made by anyone, even a third party. What matters is that the payment be documented, a payment order with a clear explanation, stating the case and the purpose, and confirmed in writing by the company. An undocumented payment has no legal effect.
Not automatically barred. Following the amendment of Article 6(2) of Legea nr. 31/1990 by Legea nr. 162/2019, the bar operates only if the court has expressly imposed, as a supplementary penalty, the prohibition on acting as a founder; under Article 73¹, the rule also applies to directors and managers. Without that mention in the judgment, the conviction does not, by itself, result in disqualification. Later on, rehabilitation removes the consequences of the conviction.
Yes, in cases with no effect on the European Union's financial interests, a category which, as a rule, includes embezzlement from a private company with no EU funds involved. The exception, confirmed by the Court of Justice of the European Union, including in a judgment of 16 July 2026, concerns serious fraud affecting the Union's financial interests, treated as serious, in the absence of a national threshold, when the total value exceeds EUR 50,000. Cases that are closed with final effect are not reopened.
Informative material, updated on 18 July 2026. It does not constitute legal or tax advice; the calculation of limitation and the effects of repayment depend on the specific classification and on the documents in the file, and nothing here guarantees a result. Every person under investigation is presumed innocent until a conviction becomes final.
If the matter involves a criminal complaint or an open file, the related analyses are grouped under economic criminal law. For how such charges are handled, see company-law offences 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.