Tax evasion lawyer.
Tax evasion is the offence set out in art. 9 of Law no. 241/2005: hiding the taxable source, leaving operations or revenue out of the accounts, recording expenses with no real operation behind them, destroying accounting records, keeping double books. It carries three to ten years of imprisonment and a ban on certain rights, or a fine. We defend administrators, shareholders and companies from the first day of the inspection.
In short
Art. 9 of Law no. 241/2005, alongside art. 8 (unlawful refunds) and art. 6^1 (withheld tax).
Three to ten years and a ban on certain rights, or a fine. Art. 8 (2), association to commit the offence, carries five to fifteen years.
Art. 10 (1): if a damage of up to EUR 1,000,000 is covered in full, increased by 15%, within at most 30 days of the end of the inspection, the act is not punished and the authorities do not notify the prosecution.
Art. 11 of the law makes precautionary measures mandatory for these offences. That is why accounts are frozen so early, and why the fight is over scope, not over whether.
Art. 10^1: time runs from the notification of the tax authority or of the prosecution, but no later than ten years from the date of the offence.
What you hand over and what you state at the start sets the frame of the case. Before any statement, ask for a lawyer and for time to read the file.
When you need a lawyer
An ANAF fiscal inspection has ended in a criminal complaint (sesizare penală)
You or your company has received a summons from the prosecutor’s office (DNA, DIICOT or the local prosecution office) for tax evasion
You have been sent to trial for an offence under Law 241/2005
A precautionary seizure has been placed on your assets or accounts
How the file moves
The tax inspection ends with a report and, where the authority considers the thresholds are met, with a criminal complaint. The report is an administrative document, not a verdict, and both the figure and the reasoning can be challenged.
The prosecutor opens the investigation in rem, that is against the deed, under art. 305 of the Criminal Procedure Code. At this stage there is no suspect yet, but documents are already being gathered and people are already being heard as witnesses.
Precautionary measures follow, and under art. 11 of Law no. 241/2005 they are mandatory. Art. 249 of the Criminal Procedure Code requires them to serve a purpose: securing confiscation, the fine, the costs or the repair of the damage. Anything beyond that purpose is contestable.
Criminal proceedings are set in motion against a person under art. 309: from that moment you are a defendant, you are summoned to be heard, and you are entitled to a copy of the order.
The damage is established by a specialist expert report, and art. 10 (2) gives the suspect or the defendant the right to take part in it. Under HP no. 430/2025, if that report is missing, the indictment is irregular and the case goes back to the prosecutor.
The preliminary chamber checks jurisdiction, the lawfulness of the referral and the lawfulness of the evidence, under art. 342. It is the last stage where an unlawfully gathered piece of evidence can be removed before the merits are argued.
What the law says
The nine ways the offence is committed
Art. 9 (1) punishes nine acts, all committed for the purpose of evading tax obligations: hiding the taxable or chargeable good or source; leaving commercial operations or revenue out of the accounts or out of other legal documents, in whole or in part; recording in the accounts, in the electronic invoice or in other legal documents expenses with no real operation behind them, or recording other fictitious operations; altering, destroying or hiding accounting records or data storage media, including electronic ones; keeping double accounts; evading financial, tax or customs checks by not declaring, or by declaring fictitiously or inaccurately, the main or secondary premises of the persons checked; substituting, damaging or disposing of assets seized under the Tax Procedure Code and the Criminal Procedure Code, by the debtor or by third parties; using, as a taxpayer and in bad faith, the national RO e-Factura electronic invoicing system to give fictitious operations an appearance of legality or to conceal the real flow of goods or services; using electronic fiscal cash registers that are not connected, as the law requires, to the national IT system for supervising and monitoring fiscal data, or altering them so that they transmit no fiscal data or false fiscal data. Law no. 126/2024 rewrote the opening of the paragraph and several of these letters and added the last two, so the wording that matters is the one in force at the time of the deed.
The dividing line that decides most cases is not the figure. It is the purpose. A tax irregularity, however large, is a contravention as long as the purpose of evading the obligation is not proved. That is why a defence that only argues the amount has already conceded the harder half of the case.
Limitation runs differently here
Art. 10^1, added by Law no. 126/2024, is the provision most often missed. For the offences in this law, the limitation period does not run from the deed. It runs from the notification of the tax authority or of the prosecution, and it is capped at ten years from the date the offence was committed. In practice this means an old file can still be alive, and an equally old one can be dead. The date of the notification has to be established from the file, not assumed.
Paying the damage
Art. 10 is the most consequential provision in the law, and it works on a clock. Within at most 30 days of the end of the inspection, if the damage is up to EUR 1,000,000 and is covered in full, increased by 15% plus interest and penalties, the act is not punished and the authorities do not notify the prosecution at all. The file does not become lighter. It does not start.
After that window the mechanism still works, but it costs more and it gives less. During the investigation, the same threshold, the damage increased by 25%: the act is not punished, under art. 16 (1) (h) of the Criminal Procedure Code. In the preliminary chamber or at trial until the first-instance judgment, increased by 50%. Payment in full by the first hearing halves the sentence limits, and for a recovered damage of up to EUR 1,000,000 a fine becomes possible. After the first hearing and until final judgment, the limits are reduced by one third.
Two details decide whether the mechanism is available at all. It applies to every defendant, even to those who did not contribute to covering the damage, under art. 10 (4). And it is closed off by art. 10 (6) for anyone who committed another offence under this law within five years of the deed for which they already benefited from it. Whether that five-year window is open is the first thing to check, before any payment is made.
There is also a rarely used route. Art. 10 (5) halves the special limits for someone who reports the offence to the prosecution or to the tax authority while it is still running, or within one year of the end of the criminal activity, before the prosecution has been notified, and who then helps establish the truth and hold other participants to account.
Seizure on accounts and assets
For these offences the seizure is not a matter of prosecutorial discretion. Art. 11 of Law no. 241/2005 makes precautionary measures mandatory. That closes off the argument that the measure should not have been taken at all, and moves the whole defence onto its scope.
Scope is where the file is actually fought. Art. 249 of the Criminal Procedure Code ties the measure to a purpose: to prevent goods that may be subject to special or extended confiscation from being hidden, destroyed, disposed of or removed, or to secure the fine, the judicial costs or the repair of the damage. A seizure calibrated on a figure taken from the inspection report, rather than on the damage as it can actually be proved, exceeds that purpose. So does one that freezes the operating accounts of a company that still has staff to pay.
When the company is charged too
A company answers criminally in its own name for offences committed in carrying out its object of activity, or in its interest, or on its behalf, under art. 135 of the Criminal Code. Its liability does not remove the liability of the individual who contributed to the same deed, and the individual’s does not remove the company’s. Both can be in the same file, and often are.
The main penalty for a company is a fine. The complementary ones are what actually end businesses: dissolution, suspension of activity or of one of its activities for three months to three years, closure of working points for the same term, a ban on taking part in public procurement for one to three years, placement under judicial supervision, and publication of the conviction. For a company that lives on public contracts, the procurement ban is the real sentence.
How we work
Financial analysis
We reconstruct the alleged mechanism and the actual loss from the accounting and tax facts, not from the inspection report alone.
Procedural review
We examine how the file moved from fiscal inspection to criminal case: the ANAF report, the way the evidence was gathered and the seizure.
Defence & damage strategy
We challenge the legal classification of the offence and, where it serves you, use the payment-of-damage mechanism to reduce exposure.
How the fee is set
We set the fee at the start, in writing, and we say what moves it. There are three structures: a fixed fee per procedural stage, which is what most clients choose because it makes the cost predictable; an hourly fee, for work whose extent cannot be estimated at the outset; and, where the law allows it, a success component added to a reduced base.
What moves it up is measurable before we start: the number of volumes in the file, the number of defendants and whether their positions conflict, whether an accounting expert report is needed and whether it has to be challenged, whether preventive measures have been taken, and whether the case is heard outside Cluj. What does not move it is the size of the damage on its own.
The first consultation is where we tell you whether you have a case worth defending on the merits, whether the art. 10 window is still open, and what it would cost. If the answer is that you do not need us, that is the answer you get.
Who represents you
Dr George Zlati is a partner at ZIC Legal (Zlati Ionescu Chiperi SCA), based in Cluj-Napoca and practising nationwide. As counsel, he drafted and argued the constitutional challenges upheld by the Constitutional Court in Decisions no. 87/2019 and no. 233/2021, and in 2020 he received the “Vintilă Dongoroz” Prize of the Union of Jurists of Romania.
- Author, Treatise on Cybercrime
- Cited in binding ÎCCJ rulings
- External collaborator, INM
- Vintilă Dongoroz Award 2020
- Corruption & abuse-of-office offences
- Cybercrime
- Economic offences
- LL.M. criminal sciences (top of class)
Frequently asked questions
What does tax evasion actually mean?
It means one of the nine acts in art. 9 (1) (a) to (i) of Law no. 241/2005, committed for the purpose of evading tax obligations. The purpose is part of the offence. Without it, what remains is a tax irregularity, which is dealt with administratively.
What is the sentence for tax evasion?
Three to ten years of imprisonment and a ban on certain rights, or a fine. Association to commit the offence in art. 8 carries five to fifteen years. Paying the damage changes these limits, sometimes to the point where the act is no longer punished at all.
Can I get a fine instead of prison?
Yes. For the basic form, art. 9 (1) of Law no. 241/2005 provides for a fine as an alternative to imprisonment, and the choice is made when the sentence is individualised. Separately, if payment in full is made by the first hearing, the sentence limits are halved, and where the recovered damage is up to EUR 1,000,000 inclusive, art. 10 (2) expressly allows a fine. Whether that route is open depends on the amount, on the timing and on art. 10 (6).
If I pay the damage, does the case close?
Within at most 30 days of the end of the inspection, for a damage of up to EUR 1,000,000 covered in full, increased by 15% plus interest and penalties, yes: the act is not punished and the authorities do not notify the prosecution. Later, at the same threshold, the act is still not punished if payment in full carries an increase of 25% during the investigation, 50% in the preliminary chamber or at trial until the first-instance judgment, or 100% on appeal, plus interest and penalties. Before paying, check art. 10 (6): the routes in paragraphs (1) and (2) are closed to anyone who committed another offence under this law within five years of the deed for which they already benefited from them.
When does tax evasion become time-barred?
Under art. 10^1, the limitation period runs from the notification of the tax authority or of the prosecution, not from the deed, and it cannot start later than ten years after the offence. The general terms in art. 154 of the Criminal Code then apply to that starting point. The date of the notification has to be taken from the file.
ANAF has filed a criminal complaint against me. What happens next?
The prosecutor opens the investigation against the deed, gathers the accounting documents and hears people as witnesses. The inspection report is not a verdict: both the way the damage was computed and the way the evidence was obtained can be challenged, and the criminal classification has to be proved separately from the tax finding.
A seizure has been placed on my accounts. Can I challenge it?
The measure itself is mandatory here, under art. 11 of the law, so the challenge is about its scope. Art. 249 of the Criminal Procedure Code ties it to a purpose, and a seizure calibrated on the inspection figure rather than on the provable damage goes beyond it. Move early: the operating accounts are usually what is frozen first.
Can I be prosecuted as an administrator for what the company did?
Yes, and the two liabilities run in parallel. The company answers under art. 135 of the Criminal Code for deeds committed in carrying out its object of activity or in its interest, and that does not remove the liability of the person who contributed to the same deed. The defence of the administrator and the defence of the company are not always the same defence.
Who computes the damage, and can I contest the figure?
The damage is established by a specialist expert report, and art. 10 (2) gives the suspect or the defendant the right to take part in it. This is not a formality: under HP no. 430/2025, if the report is missing, the indictment is irregular and the case is returned to the prosecutor.
I was summoned as a witness. Should I go, and should I bring a lawyer?
Go, and bring one. If a witness attends questioning accompanied by a lawyer, the lawyer may be present, under art. 118 (4) of the Criminal Procedure Code. The witness has the right not to state facts that would incriminate them, and evidence obtained in breach of that right cannot be used against them in any criminal proceedings. In tax files a witness is often one step away from becoming a suspect.
What is the difference between a tax contravention and the offence?
The purpose of evading the obligation. Not every fiscal irregularity is a crime: many situations are administrative only, however large the sum. Where that line falls is usually the heart of the defence.
What we have written on this
Related areas
Don’t wait for the first hearing.
Who assists you from day one matters.