Romania’s minister of innovation and digitalization has resigned after an investigation by journalists who reported they found significant irregularities on his resume and evidence he plagiarized from an academic paper.
Florin Roman, who had served in Romania’s new coalition government for less than a month, quit his post after Romania’s Libertatea newspaper published a third article calling his claimed educational credentials into question.
He said he didn’t want the suspicion surrounding him to affect the prime minister, Nicolae Ciuca.
“I resigned today as minister,” Roman wrote online after a government meeting. “When white turns black, when everything is misinterpreted, when you make material mistakes, but when you reach the lynching from the first day of office – it is too much.”
The journalists at Libertatea accused Roman of having plagiarized part of his master’s thesis and said they could not locate a 2006 academic paper that the politician listed on his resume. The newspaper also reported that Roman made misleading or false statements about which university he attended.
Roman strongly denied the newspaper’s findings, calling them part of a “campaign to denigrate me”.
Several high-profile Romanian politicians, including former prime ministers, have been accused of plagiarism in recent years.
Dacian Ciolos, who served as prime minister in a caretaker cabinet between 2015 and 2017, described Roman’s resignation as a “necessary act”.
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