The tax evasion (evaziune fiscală) file is still with the prosecutor. There is no indictment, no judgment, nothing final. Yet the order you are reading today sets criminal proceedings in motion for money laundering, because, three months after the period under review, money was transferred to a company owned by your spouse and land was bought. The natural reaction is that the prosecution has skipped a step: how can there be “dirty money” before anyone has established that it is dirty? The unwelcome answer is that the law does not require that step.
Money laundering is an autonomous accusation. It does not depend on a conviction for the predicate offence; it depends on proof of the unlawful origin, which is taken in the money-laundering file itself. The difference between the two statements is the whole space for the defence. The presumption of innocence remains the rule until a final judgment.
Under Article 49(1) of Legea nr. 129/2019, the conduct described in three alternative forms constitutes the offence of money laundering and is punishable by imprisonment from 3 to 10 years.
Converting or transferring property, knowing that it derives from the commission of offences, for the purpose of concealing or disguising its unlawful origin, or to help the perpetrator of the predicate offence evade prosecution, trial or the execution of the sentence.
Concealing or disguising the true nature, source, location, disposition, movement or ownership of property, or of rights over it, knowing that the property derives from the commission of offences.
Acquiring, possessing or using property by a person other than the perpetrator of the offence from which the property derives, knowing that it derives from the commission of offences.
The attempt is punishable [paragraph (2)]. If the offence is committed by a legal person, the court applies one or more supplementary penalties alongside the fine [paragraph (3)].
The three points are alternative forms of the same offence, not three separate offences. Each, however, has its own physical element, and the differences between them usually decide the fate of the accusation. Point (a) requires a purpose, disguise or helping the perpetrator; without it, a transfer remains a mere transfer. Point (b) requires an act of concealment or disguise, an operation that masks something. Point (c) requires the perpetrator to be someone other than the person who committed the underlying act.
This is the heart of the subject. No provision of Article 49 makes liability for money laundering conditional on a prior or simultaneous conviction for the predicate offence. This position rests on two converging grounds.
The Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds from Crime, ratified by Romania, provides in Article 9(5) that a prior or simultaneous conviction for the predicate offence is not a condition for a conviction for laundering.
By Decision no. 16 of 8 June 2016, the High Court of Cassation and Justice confirmed the autonomous nature of the offence, while also holding that points (a), (b) and (c) are alternative forms.
Neither the Convention nor the decision removes the constituent element of the criminal origin of the property. Autonomy shifts the burden of proof into the laundering file; it does not abolish it.
The practical consequence is twofold and must be read both ways. Yes: the prosecutor may charge laundering without waiting for the tax evasion, embezzlement (delapidare) or funds-fraud file to be concluded. But: the criminal origin of the property remains a constituent element that must be proved, with evidence, in the laundering file. The prosecution cannot simply invoke a “file in progress” or a general suspicion over the estate; it must identify the underlying act, describe it and prove it to the standard of criminal proceedings.
WARNING: The phrase “no conviction for the predicate offence is required” is often used in indictments as though it meant “the predicate offence need not be shown”. That is not the same thing. If the underlying act is not concretely identified and proved, not merely suspected, not merely asserted by reference to another file, the laundering accusation has no object. Check exactly what the indictment claims has been proved, and by what evidence, act by act.
1. The criminal origin of the property. The property must derive from the commission of offences. The law does not give an exhaustive list of predicate offences: the formula covers any act under criminal law that generates property, from tax evasion and embezzlement to EU funds fraud. What must be established, though, is the link between the specific property and the specific act. When lawful funds have been mixed with allegedly unlawful funds in the same account, the question becomes an accounting one, not a rhetorical one.
2. Knowledge. Article 49(4) expressly provides that “knowledge of the origin of the property, or the purpose pursued, must be established from objective factual circumstances”. The text does not create a presumption of guilt and does not authorise an inference from mere appearances. It points to the method: knowledge is proved indirectly, through verifiable material facts, prices plainly below market value, payment structures with no economic rationale, the interposition of companies with no real activity, the unjustified urgency of a transaction. The defence is built on exactly this ground: each “objective circumstance” relied on must admit only one reasonable explanation, that of knowledge. If it admits another, the mental element has not been proved.
3. The physical element specific to the form relied on. Not every movement of money is laundering. Simply using funds, paying ordinary expenses, or withdrawing cash from one's own account does not, by itself, amount to an act of disguise. When the indictment describes as “laundering” the very operations by which the predicate offence was carried out, with nothing added, the accusation collapses into itself.
The question comes up in every file: can the person who committed the underlying act also be liable for laundering? The legal history runs as follows.
Under Legea nr. 656/2002, the perpetrator of laundering could also be the perpetrator of the predicate offence.
By Decision no. 418 of 19 June 2018, the Constitutional Court found Article 29(1)(c) of Legea nr. 656/2002 unconstitutional, as interpreted by ÎCCJ Decision no. 16/2016 regarding the perpetrator. The person who committed the underlying act cannot also be the perpetrator of laundering in the form of acquisition, possession or use.
The legislature wrote the solution directly into the text: point (c) applies only “by a person other than the perpetrator of the offence from which the property derives”.
By its judgment of 2 September 2021 (Parchetul de pe lângă Tribunalul Brașov), the Court of Justice held that EU law does not preclude national legislation allowing laundering to be committed by the perpetrator of the predicate offence. EU law permits self-laundering; it does not require it for every form of the offence.
The result, at the time of writing: self-laundering remains possible under point (a) and point (b), but is excluded, by the legislature's express choice, under point (c). This is the first thing to check in any order. Why this discussion comes up almost mechanically in management-offence files is explained in the analysis on embezzlement and money laundering.
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 money laundering defence.
Article 49(5) provides that paragraphs (1) to (4) apply regardless of whether the offence from which the property derives was committed on Romanian territory, in other member states, or in third countries. A Romanian laundering file can therefore have as its source an act committed in Italy, in Germany, or in a third country.
What does not change is the evidentiary requirement: the foreign act must be identified and proved, and its criminal character established. Merely invoking an investigation opened in another state, with no evidential content brought into the file, makes up for nothing. The specific risks of cross-border flows are dealt with separately, in the analysis on foreign accounts and criminal consequences.
The sentence is 3 to 10 years. First-instance jurisdiction lies with the tribunal. As for the criminal investigation, Article 11 of O.U.G. nr. 78/2016 provides that laundering falls within DIICOT's jurisdiction only if the property derives from offences that fall within that structure's jurisdiction, not automatically, by the mere fact of being charged under Article 49. Checking jurisdiction is a real issue, not a formal one: it decides who conducts the case and, often, how long it takes. The procedural stages are the same as in any economic file and are described in the analysis on how the criminal investigation unfolds.
In parallel, a laundering accusation opens precautionary seizure (sechestru asigărător) over a much wider perimeter than the underlying act, including property held by third parties.
Special confiscation (Article 112 of the Criminal Code) targets property acquired through the act, to the extent that it is not returned to the injured party and does not serve to compensate them.
Extended confiscation (Article 112¹ of the Criminal Code) is the harsher tool. It applies on conviction for an offence capable of producing a material benefit, for which the law prescribes imprisonment of 4 years or more, a condition met by laundering. The court may confiscate property acquired in a period of 5 years before, and, as the case may be, after the act was committed, up to the referral of the case to the court, if its value manifestly and disproportionately exceeds lawfully obtained income. The court's conviction may rest on this disproportion alone, and the calculation also includes property transferred to family members or to legal persons controlled by the convicted person. The mechanism is set out in detail in the dedicated analysis on extended confiscation.
This is where the principled criticism lies: the mechanism brings confiscation close to a probability standard, while the presumption of innocence requires certainty. The case law of the European Court of Human Rights accepts, in principle, the confiscation of property of unexplained origin and the reversal of the burden of proof, but does so within in rem proceedings of a preventive character, to which Article 6(2) of the Convention does not apply (see Gogitidze and Others v. Georgia, 12 May 2015). Extended confiscation under Romanian law, by contrast, is ordered within criminal proceedings, after conviction, which is why the automatic transposition of that permissive reasoning is questionable and must be challenged point by point.
WARNING, the time limit on extended confiscation. By Decision no. 11 of 15 January 2015, the Constitutional Court held that Article 112¹(2)(a) of the Criminal Code is constitutional only insofar as extended confiscation does not apply to property acquired before Legea nr. 63/2012 entered into force, the act that introduced the measure into Romanian law. The measure cannot operate retroactively: the 5-year period cannot be pushed back beyond that point, and any property acquired earlier falls outside the calculation. This is a check to make before any discussion of the merits of disproportion.
In practice, the defence on this point is documentary: reconstructing, year by year, the lawful sources for the relevant period, income, loans, sales, inheritances, capital contributions.
A spouse, relative or business partner who receives property without knowing its origin is not criminally liable, and knowledge must be proved, not presumed from the degree of kinship or the closeness of the relationship.
It is vulnerable: the property can be seized, and the third party must intervene actively to prove that the acquisition was genuine and for value. Documents drawn up at the time of the transaction, not afterwards, are the only effective protection.
Banks, notaries, accountants, bailiffs and the other entities listed by Legea nr. 129/2019 send the National Office for the Prevention and Control of Money Laundering reports on suspicious transactions and on operations above the statutory thresholds. A suspicious-transaction report is not an accusation: it is an administrative flag, which may lead nowhere. It does explain, however, why files sometimes start without any complaint.
Article 33 of the law provides that professional and banking secrecy cannot be relied on against the Office, except in the situations under paragraph (5): information received from the client, or obtained in connection with them, in the course of assessing their legal position, in fulfilling the duty of defence or representation in judicial proceedings, or in connection with such proceedings. The exception falls away if the lawyer knows that the assistance is being sought precisely for the purpose of money laundering. Legea nr. 86/2025 (Official Gazette no. 483 of 23 May 2025) kept this structure in place.
EU law points the same way: by its judgment of 8 December 2022, the CJEU, C-694/20 (Orde van Vlaamse Balies), invalidated the lawyer's obligation to notify other intermediaries, as an unjustified interference with the confidentiality of client-lawyer communications protected by Article 7 of the Charter. Professional privilege is not a corporate formality; it is a guarantee of the right to a defence.
In theory, autonomy does not rule out that possibility, but everything depends on the ground for the acquittal. If the acquittal was based on the act not existing or not having been committed, then precisely the criminal origin of the property, a constituent element of laundering, disappears. If the ground is something else, the question remains open and is argued on the evidence. In every case, the outcome of the source file must be expressly raised and examined in the reasoning of the judgment.
Not automatically. It must first be established that the funds come from a criminal act; a tax assessment decision (decizie de impunere) is not a conviction and does not, by itself, prove an offence. It must then be shown that there is a distinct material act of disguise. A purchase made in one's own name, declared, paid through the bank and registered in the land register is the opposite of disguise.
That you cannot be required to prove that you did not know. The prosecutor must point to specific material facts from which knowledge follows. The defence consists in showing that those facts also admit other reasonable explanations, a market practice, a genuine commercial urgency, a price justified by the condition of the asset.
Yes, the precautionary measure can extend to property held by third parties, and in the context of extended confiscation the law expressly takes into account transfers to family members. The third party, however, has the right to challenge the measure and can prove that the acquisition was genuine and in good faith. Documents contemporaneous with the transaction are essential.
Informative material, updated on 18 July 2026. It does not constitute legal advice; individual situations must be assessed on their own facts, on the evidence in each file. Nothing in this material amounts to a promise of any particular outcome.
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.