Key points
- Vlad-Cristian Soare led Romania’s gambling regulator ONJN from April 2025 until 21 August 2026.
- He told Adevărul on 15 October 2026 that he expects a negative report on the €5 million “Conștient și Liber” program.
- ONJN selected 54 projects on 28 July 2026, and Soare said no financing contract had been signed by September.
- Soare listed the measures he says may have disturbed interests, from QR codes on machines to self-exclusion reform.
Vlad-Cristian Soare, who led Romania’s National Office for Gambling (ONJN) from April 2025 until 21 August 2026, has contested the ONJN review his successors ordered of a €5 million responsible gambling funding program. He told Adevărul in an interview on 15 October that he expects a negative report.
The €5m program
The program, “Conștient și Liber” (Conscious and Free), had a budget of about €5 million out of roughly €30 million that ONJN has for non-refundable social responsibility grants, Soare said. Projects could receive up to €100,000 each, with 10% co-financing required under Law 350/2005.
ONJN signed a collaboration agreement with the research funding agency UEFISCDI on 8 December 2025, and independent evaluators were chosen through the state’s BrainMap platform, Soare said. Of 199 applications, 180 were eligible after appeals. Final results on 28 July 2026 showed 46 projects admitted to full funding and 8 partly funded, while 107 were listed as “buget epuizat” (budget exhausted).
Soare said a Ministry of Finance letter of April 2026 allocated 26,017,000 lei to the program. Contracting stalled on a missing project code in the budget structure, he said. A fix agreed with the Ministry of Finance went into a fiscal and budgetary measures draft, was removed and was not adopted later as a parliamentary amendment. He said he does not claim to have proven a political order, but that the path of an official solution should be explained.
Soare on the ONJN review
ONJN’s new leadership suspended the funding and ordered checks of the program’s legal, budgetary and administrative procedures, Adevărul reported. According to the newspaper’s questions, an ONJN communiqué of 2 October says the program lacked a proper budgetary basis. Soare said the missing project code was a technical budget problem to be fixed before contracting, and that the funding itself was approved in the 2026 state budget law.
He also questioned the working group carrying out the review. Soare said it works outside ONJN’s own structure and includes people whose mandates he declined to propose for extension or whom he sent to the disciplinary commission. “I expect the report to be a negative one,” he said (translated from Romanian).
The two sides also dispute his mandate figures. Soare said his report cites about 1,300 illegal sites blacklisted, more than 11,000 control acts and almost 10 million lei in fines, and that the current leadership approved the 2025 activity report with reservations while contesting those numbers.
Interests Soare says he affected
Asked whose interests his tenure disturbed, Soare did not name operators or officials. He listed measures, each framed as a question about who gained from the previous situation.
He cited legislation introducing QR codes and geolocation on gaming equipment and a public register of machines, and digitalisation systems prepared with the Authority for the Digitalisation of Romania. On self-exclusion, he said about 30,000 requests were unprocessed when he took over. His draft emergency ordinance, agreed with the Ministry of Finance, would unify the system with a cool-off period, but it has not been adopted, he said.
Soare said the same ordinance proposed moving control from ONJN to the Police to cut corruption risk. He said he refused to issue operating licences in breach of the law, and that strict application of the law contracted the Romanian market by more than 70%. He also said he referred alleged tax base manipulation by online operators to criminal investigators.
The National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) searched ONJN’s headquarters on 29 July 2026, Economica.net reported, citing judicial sources speaking to Agerpres. Soare said that day that ONJN was cooperating with prosecutors and that a reorganisation based on an integrity criterion had begun.
The leadership change
Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan released Soare from the post and appointed Valentin-Ioan Tomescu as ONJN president on 21 August 2026, through decisions 283/2026 and 284/2026 published in Monitorul Oficial, European Gaming reported. The decisions gave no reasons.
“I ask those at ONJN not to turn people affected by gambling addiction into collateral victims of leadership changes.”
Vlad-Cristian Soare, former President of ONJN, to Adevărul on 15 October 2026 (translated from Romanian)
The working group’s report on the program is pending. Soare said contracting was due immediately after the project code enters the budget structure, and that in September ONJN’s responsible gambling department presented options for continuing the project, as agreed with the Ministry of Finance.
