Ziarul de Gardă once again penetrated Ilan Shor’s network. For three months we have documented from the inside with the help of a hidden camera how money circulates and how people working for Ilan Shor are recruited and lured to serve Moscow. The stakes – hijacking the country’s European course by compromising the October 20 referendum and the organized vote for a Shor-backed candidate to be announced just one day before the elections.

For three months, an undercover ZdG reporter, acting under a false identity, attended events organized by Shor’s people: so-called protests before or after court hearings of Shor’s corrupt politicians, electoral meetings with one of Shor’s candidates, whom the oligarch’s people believe will be eliminated from the race, and even handed out leaflets with false information about the European Union and the Eurasian Union.

The Shor network opened an account for the ZdG reporter in a Russian state bank using personal data that does NOT exist in reality. With the help of ZdG’s technical team, an identity card with made-up data was “cloned”, and in September, after almost two months in the service of Shor and Moscow, the ZdG reporter received the promised “iablociki”, i.e. 15 thousand Russian roubles, equivalent to about 2.7 thousand MDL (140 Eur). After all, the reporter ended up with less money for her “work” after being charged several fees along the way, both by the banks involved in the transactions and by the individuals who coordinated it. In October, another 15 thousand Russian rubles were transferred to the same account. Throughout this period, the ZdG reporter received several phone calls “from Moscow” thanking her for her work.

The scheme operated even on the day when the police and prosecutor’s office announced that they had dismantled a national bribing network. They had discovered that around 130 thousand Moldovans had been bribed for their vote on October 20, however this scheme was still in effect after the law enforcement bodies had uncovered it.

Two years after the publication of the investigation “Protesters to rent”, in which we showed that the participants in the protests organized by the former “Shor” party were paid, ZdG has penetrated again into Ilan Shor’s network. We found a similar reality, where money dictates and fuels any protest movement and spirit. But the differences are at the level of organization and circulation of money.