Romania’s PM Faces Plagiarism Accusations

Romania’s Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca faces plagiarism accusations. He is not the first politician to face such allegations in Romania. Many others were forced to resign after such charges appeared in mass media.

A famous Romanian journalist specializing in investigating plagiarism cases discovered his doctoral thesis has parts that have been copied from other doctoral theses without rigorous citation.

Actually, she is the very journalist who was threatened by an officer from Bucharest Police Academy, A.I. Cuza, at the rector’s request.

According to Prime Minister Ciucă, his doctoral thesis was “prepared according to the legal requirements at the time.”

However, the journalist stated that at least 42 thesis pages out of 138 are plagiarized, and she can provide evidence of this. Also, she declared that the paper is not the product of scientific research, and it lacks a methodology, corpus, and proper analysis.

Notably enough, the journalist was granted access to the thesis in December 2021, only after three requests to the National Library beginning in May 2021.

This is not the first time we have heard that Romania’s politicians plagiarize scientific papers. Who’s next? And, more importantly, is the PM going to resign over the accusations?