Explosive bribery probe rocks Romania’s gambling sector

• Romania’s founding ONJN president Odeta Nestor has been arrested on bribery charges, including allegations she helped pay €100,000 to manipulate the result of a compliance inspection at the regulator.
• Investigative reports link the case to a web of online casinos; a Bulgarian national connected to the operator was caught handing over the final instalment in April 2026.
• Bucharest Mayor Ciprian Ciucu faces a separate bribery charge spun off from the same probe, alongside television journalist Denise Rifai, in what has become Romania’s most politically charged gambling case in years.

Bucharest Tribunal on 17 June 2026 ordered Odeta Nestor, founding president of the National Gambling Office (ONJN), into 30-day pre-trial detention on multiple bribery and corruption charges.

Romania’s National Anti-Corruption Directorate (DNA) announced the measure on 18 June, alongside the placement of Bucharest Mayor Ciprian Ciucu under 60-day judicial control for alleged bribery. Both cases stem from a single criminal probe registered in August 2025, rooted in alleged corruption at the heart of Romania’s gambling regulatory process.

The bribery case

Nestor is identified in court documents by the initials N.C.O. She faces charges of complicity in bribery, bribery in continued form across three separate acts, and instigating unauthorised access to confidential regulatory information.

Between 21 November 2025 and 17 March 2026, she allegedly paid a total of €1,500 and 2,000 lei across three transactions to an authorised ONJN collaborator, with payments intended to expedite or delay official administrative procedures.

On 24 March 2026, she is alleged to have paid a further €500 through the same collaborator. On 3 April, she allegedly persuaded the same official to allow access to non-public documents received by the regulator.

The most serious allegation centres on a Bulgarian national, identified in the DNA official notice as R.D.M., acting on behalf of a gambling operator then subject to ongoing ONJN compliance checks. Between 2 and 6 April, Nestor allegedly facilitated R.D.M.’s promise of €100,000 to an ONJN official. The purpose was to ensure checks concluded without sanctions and without any referral to criminal or financial intelligence authorities.

R.D.M. paid €45,000 on 8 April. Prosecutors caught him in flagrante in mid-April when he attempted to hand over the remaining €50,000. Bucharest Tribunal ordered both Nestor and the Bulgarian national into 30-day pre-trial detention on 17 June.

The Ciucu investigation was registered as a separate file in December 2025, spun off from the same initial probe. DNA alleges that in November 2025, two businessmen offered Ciprian Ciucu, then mayor of Bucharest’s Sector 6, electoral advertising and consultancy services, funding his campaign for the office of Bucharest Mayor. The alleged quid pro quo was construction documents for a residential project in Bucharest. A third businessman allegedly facilitated the arrangement.

Also named as a suspect in the same case is Denise Rifai, one of Romania’s most prominent television journalists and host of the interview programme 40 de întrebări. Rifai faces charges of instigation and complicity in bribery. Multiple Romanian media outlets reported she filed the criminal complaint with DNA that advanced the investigation into Ciucu. Rifai confirmed to Gândul that she knows Nestor personally.

Ciucu was not suspended from office. All three businessmen were placed under judicial control, two for bribery and one for complicity. Ciprian Ciucu, Mayor of Bucharest, said:

“I want to carry out my term as if this doesn’t exist. My job is to take care of Bucharest and dedicate the coming period to the city. As for this specific situation, I will cooperate with the judicial authorities.”

Nestor’s background

Nestor is one of the most prominent figures in Romanian gaming. She was the first president of the ONJN, transferring from the National Lottery when the regulator was established in 2013. She served until 2017, when then-prime minister Sorin Grindeanu removed her from the post.

Her four-year tenure was widely credited with professionalising the sector. She oversaw the framework that brought online gambling into Romanian law, work that drew recognition across Europe and is still cited as a benchmark at international conferences.

After leaving the ONJN, Nestor moved to the industry side, taking the helm of the Association of Online Distance Gambling Organisers (AOJND), which represents licensed remote gambling operators. In that capacity she positioned the body as a dialogue partner with authorities, focused on solutions that serve operators, players, and the broader Romanian economy.

Odeta Nestor, president of AOJND, said of her time at the ONJN:

“From 2013 to 2017 I headed ONJN and, in this capacity, I had a direct contribution to the drafting and adoption of legislation and put Romania at the forefront of countries with very good regulation.”

Her ties to the private online gambling sector are widely known through her work over the years. DNA prosecutors allege she leveraged that position to influence the very institution she once ran.

The Soare factor

The arrests arrive on the desk of Vlad-Cristian Soare, appointed ONJN president on 25 April 2025 to restore credibility to a regulator already under severe institutional pressure.

Soare is a lawyer and former lecturer at the University of Bucharest. Before joining the ONJN, he served as General Director of the Romanian National Lottery from 2021 to 2022. He also held the presidency of FEDBET, the Federation of Gambling Organisers, from November 2022.

He replaced Gheorghe Gabriel Gheorghe, who resigned after a Court of Accounts audit found the ONJN had failed to identify unpaid gambling taxes of between RON 3.3 and 4.3 billion. That same audit found the regulator had been without direct access to operator mirror servers for years.

Vlad-Cristian Soare, president of ONJN, said on taking office:

“My political colour is decency. That’s what I told my colleagues. I think that, beyond the differences, we need to remember what unites us: honest work, professionalism, balance.”

His first-year results reflected the scale of what had been neglected: more than 11,000 inspections, over 300 blacklisted websites, and €2.7 million in fines levied. The ONJN also filed 70 criminal complaints for unpaid taxes and revenue manipulation.

The DNA timeline exposes a sharp irony. Alleged bribery of serving ONJN officials was occurring between November 2025 and April 2026, precisely the period Soare was making the institutional clean-up as his defining mission. The allegation that an operator was paying to shape the outcome of a compliance check cuts directly against the narrative of a regulator that had reasserted control.

Romania’s parliament is debating proposals to raise the legal gambling age to 21, expand local council powers over venue zoning, and progress the advertising reforms that have been in motion since late 2025. The Nestor case will sharpen political resolve on all three fronts.

Beyond the legislative agenda, the exposure of alleged corruption refocuses scrutiny on the 2013–2017 ONJN years. A period long held up as Romania’s regulatory benchmark now faces a very different kind of examination.

Update: This article has been updated. References to specific casinos have been removed after the original source article was withdrawn. This article reflects only information that can be independently verified through local Romanian reports.