Prime Minister willing to quit his doctorate

Tuesday morning, Prime Minster Victor Ponta said that he would submit the specialized committee of the Ministry of Education to give ”all the necessary explanations” regarding the plagiarism charges brought against him.

” It’s a complete setup”, the vicepresident said.

At a press conference held at the Parliament,Victor Ponta alleged that Daniel Funeriu, the presidential councilor who also gave an interview in January 2011 for „Nature”, the magazine that published the article, was behind everything.

The prime minister declared that he had consulted several professors and that the only thing that anyone could reproach him with was that he opted to cite the name of the authors in the bibliography section at the end of the thesis, and not in the footnotes at the bottom of the pages.

” If this qualifies as a mistake, I am willing to assume it and pay for it, even if costs me my doctorate”.

” But as long as all of the authors are listed in the bibliography section, no one can say that I intended to steal someone else’s work”, he said.

The Prime Minister said that these plagiarism accusations represented a phase of the ”political war” between him and the ”system represented by Traian Băsescu, namely schemes a la the old secret police, dossiers, blackmail and threats”.

The President and his councilor, Daniel Funeriu, haven’t commented on the Prime Minister ’s statement.

The National Ethics Committee

The National Committee for Ethics of Scientific Research, Technological Development and Innovation is subordinated to the Minsitry of Education. It is a consultative body, without any juridic personality other than the state authority over research and development.

The council is formed of 11 members acknowledged in the fields of research and development and specialists in ethics, research and science.

The president of the council is the Polytechnic University of Bucharest engineering professor Dr Teodor Petrescu.

The last case that was sent to the committee was rejected after the members refused to verify Ioan Mang— then designated minstry of education—arguing that their decision was based on the fact that Ioan Mang was the chief of the committee.

The Romanian Academy formed a committee of three to verify the accusations brought against Ioan Mang, but after his resignation the committee was dissolved.

Accusations in the international media

The Prime Minister ’s statement came in response to several articles that appeared Monday in the press about the suspicion that he plagiarised his doctorate thesis.

Monday, the online edition of Nature published an article in which the author alleged that the Prime Minister’s 2003 doctorate thesis in law contained entire paragraphs taken from specialized texts that had appeared earlier. The author specified that they had received from an anonymous source papers that prove that the Prime Minister ’s doctorate thesis was plagiarized .

The German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published the same information given by another anonymous source, mentioning that approximately 130 pages of his thesis were copied ” word for word” from ” The International Criminal Court--History and Reality”, a work published by Dumitru Diaconu in 1999.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister alleged that Traian Băsescu was behind these accusations and declared that it seemed strange to him that a magazine called ”Nature” was interested in his doctorate degree that was an exclusively juridic work .

The European corespondent of the above mentioned publication, Alison Abbott, declared for Radio Romania Actualități that the magazine had always been interested in cases where politicians are suspected of plagiarism.

” Our interest in this subject stemmed from the fact that we are a publication interested both in science and in the more frequent problem rtegarding academic works and academic integrity ” she said.

When asked whether she had accepted money to publish the article, she replied that ” it’s ridiculous, we are journalists and we comply with the standards of journalism.

Just like any other high-class magazine that, generally speaking, documents carefully the situation, in no way does „Nature” receive any form of payment from the informants of our articles.

" There is no way that anything like this would ever happen ” Alison Abbott said for RRA.

Translated by

Vlad Nichita

MTTLC, Bucharest University