Second Romanian minister quits after "horror asylums" scandal

Romania’s Minister of Family Gabriela Firea became the second cabinet minister to resign this week after a scandal with “horror asylums” for the elderly shook the country and the ruling Social Democratic Party (PSD).

Firea was forced by Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu to step down, after a meeting in the government building, to avoid damaging the image of the PSD, given that Romania will hold four rounds of elections next year, EURACTIV reports.

Hundreds of Romanians took part in a protest rally organised by NGO Declic in front of the government on Thursday evening, demanding her resignation.

Firea was also suspended from the leadership of PSD Bucharest.

Labour Minister Marius Budăi became the first one to resign on Thursday after prosecutors discovered appalling conditions in three care centres near Bucharest, where nearly 100 elderly residents faced starvation, torture, and exploitation at the hands of a criminal network involving state officials and private individuals.

All three were in Ilfov county, near the capital Bucharest.

Firea has repeatedly denied, including on Friday, any involvement in the Ilfov nursing home affair, but press investigations and prosecutors’ information show that people around her were making money by profiting from the elderly and sick people.

Throughout this period, Firea said she was the victim of a smear campaign aimed at discrediting her and removing her from the race for the mayorship of Bucharest.

Firea continued to defend her adviser Ligia Gheorghe, whose name appears in the management structure of the horror asylum, and she stated two minutes after her resignation that she was paying the price for “trusting people”.

“We worked together until exhaustion, until illness. We both paid with serious illnesses for the stress accumulated on television, in politics, especially at City Hall. She also pays for trusting people. She wanted to help. Not to make money, not to do harm,” Firea wrote on Facebook.

“She did NOT work in those centres. She didn’t know there were irregularities! Me, even less, I had NO connections whatsoever and I could not accept that something bad happened to a person!!”

After the discovery of the situation in Ilfov County’s nursing homes, the government has set up groups to check each county and verify how staff carry out their work. As a result of these checks, a number of such homes for the elderly have been closed across the country this week.

Elderly people in three shelters in Ilfov, north of Bucharest, were found in inhumane conditions: beaten, without medicine and forced to work without food.

“People were exploited through coercion and violence, through unpaid work, they were left hungry and subjected to degrading and inhuman treatment,” police Chief Commissioner Georgian Drăgan told Romanian media this week.