The arrest of Moldovan oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc in July 2025 at Athens International Airport has shed light on a sprawling network of forged identities, fake passports, and international concealment that allowed one of Eastern Europe’s most notorious fugitives to evade justice for six years. The revelations, emerging from investigations conducted by CU SENS in collaboration with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), highlight the extraordinary lengths to which Plahotniuc went to hide from law enforcement authorities while allegedly orchestrating one of the largest financial crimes in Moldova’s history.

Plahotniuc, once a dominant political and business figure in Moldova, is accused of masterminding the so-called “Billion Dollar Bank Fraud” that drained the Moldovan banking system between 2013 and 2015. Prosecutors in Chișinău allege that he led a criminal organization involved in large-scale money laundering, bank fraud, and the creation of complex financial schemes to siphon public and private funds. Since 2019, he had been on the run, moving across borders under multiple false identities and employing a sophisticated network of forged documents spanning Europe, the Middle East, and even the Pacific.

Investigations have revealed that Plahotniuc relied on at least six separate aliases, each tied to forged passports, identity cards, and citizenship documents from countries including Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Russia, Iraq, and Vanuatu. Greek authorities, acting on intelligence from Interpol and Moldovan prosecutors, conducted a raid on a seaside villa in Greece where Plahotniuc had been living for months. The search yielded more than 155,000 euros in cash, luxury watches, multiple phones, and 17 forged identity documents, underscoring the oligarch’s readiness to maintain a lavish lifestyle while on the run.

Among the most striking examples of identity forgery was Plahotniuc’s use of Romanian documents under........

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