“I don’t know anywhere else where we have seen such a brazen and open attempt at corruption in elections,” Moldova’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor Veronika Dragalin told me this week in her office in Chisinau.
Born in Moldova, she spent most of her life in the US – most recently as a prosecutor in Los Angeles – before returning to the country to work in a small office on the fifth floor of a Soviet building with a broken elevator.
What her team claims they uncovered while working with the police is a payment pyramid scheme openly run from Russia by Ilan Shor and his group.
“It’s about a foreign country sending money in an attempt to influence the election,” Ms. Dragalin explains. She details evidence obtained through wiretapping, police informants and witnesses – some of which her office has released.
“At first they tried to make it legitimate. Now it’s almost as if they brazenly flaunt all the laws… (and) openly influence the voting decision,” says the prosecutor.
“The main task is for the referendum to fail.”
According to her team, once the cash couriers were discovered at the airport and the route became more complicated, payments began to be routed through a sanctioned Russian bank, PSB.
By early October, 130,000 voters had been paid under the scheme – about 10% of the active electorate, according to Viarel Chernautianu, the police chief.
“In September alone, $15m (£12m) was transferred,” he told me, explaining how they can trace the funds and the recipients as they have provided personal details to open a bank account.
Offering money or goods in exchange for votes is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Last month, the new law also recognized accepting money as an administrative offense.
But in one of the poorest countries in Europe, it is not difficult to find willing recipients of money.
