Finally, Adrian Sârbu has been taken to the General Prosecutors' Office with a warrant!

Adrian Sârbu, the owner of Mediafax, was taken, with a warrant, last night, to the Prosecutors' Office, where he was going to be heard by the investigators, according to judicial sources, as he is being charged with abetment to tax evasion, embezzlement and money laundering.

Judicial sources told us that Adrian Sârbu has been called as early as last week to the General Prosecutors' Office, but he announced that he was not in Romania. The prosecutors yesterday arrested the owner of Mediafax while he was in a meeting with the mayor of the 5th District of Bucharest, Marian Vanghelie, according to B1 TV.

Adrian Sârbu did not make any statement last night before journalists.

Sources also say that Adrian Sarbu is being indicted in the Mediafax case, following the denouncements made by several of his former employees, which have been under arrest since December.

Several individuals are being prosecuted in this case, of which three are in preventive custody: Roxana Grigoruţă and Sorin Dinu, who held executive positions in SC Mediafax Group SA, and lawyer Dragoş Chiş.

Gheorghe Vâlceanu, lawyer of Mediafax CFO Sorin Dinu, currently under arrest, said that he believes in his client's innocence and that employees had a set of guidelines for doing their job.

"Several spectacular denouncements have been made over the last few days, by several of the former employees of Adrian Sârbu, who have been held in preventive custody for more than 30 days now, in spite of very difficult personal situations", according to website Sursa Zilei, which mentions that the arrested have talked about the transfer of funds from Mediafax Group to Telefericul Prahova SA, a company which Adrian Sârbu controls through a Cypriot offshore. Sursa Zilei claims: "While the prosecutors were conducting searches in Prahova, Sârbu allegedly called his employees to order to withdraw all the company's earnings and hand them over to him. According to the prosecutors, the company controlled by the businessman never issued receipts to gondola lift customers, thus earning monthly approximately 100,000 Euros «off the books».

The prosecutors of the General Prosecution Office have obtained the right to extend the preventive custody of the last three employees of the Mediafax group, claiming that data recovery from the company's servers is taking a long time. This is because Adrian Sârbu has allegedly ordered for all the data on the servers to be erased, therefore the volume of information that needs to be recovered is a lot more harder to piece together".

Sursa Zilei also reports that in the first stage of the investigation, some of the employees said that once the criminal investigation began, following the audit of the ANAF, they received messages from the board of the company, and mostly from Adrian Sârbu, to erase the emails that had to do with the company's activities.

On December 2nd, the prosecutors of the High Court of Cassation and Justice have opened a criminal case against Mediafax Group, Roxana-Dorina Grigoruţă and Orlando Nicoară, on charges of tax evasion.

Subsequently, the prosecutors of the General Prosecution Service of the High Court of Cassation and Justice have searched the headquarters of Mediafax. According to a communiqué by the General Prosecution Service, the prosecutors have conducted a search relating to a criminal case involving tax evasion and money laundering, which involves several companies in the media sector.

The three people arrested in December, in connection to the case brought by prosecutors against the Mediafax press group for money laundering are Roxana Grigoruţă (charged with tax evasion and money laundering), Sorin Dinu and Dragoş Chiş (both suspected of complicity to tax evasion and money laundering).

The general insolvency procedure has been opened against Mediafax Group, following the 16th of December ruling of the Court of Bucharest, and KPMG Restructuring SPRL has been appointed as interim administrator. According to data published by the Ministry of Public Finance (MFP), in 2013, the group had a net turnover of 77.4 million lei, losses of 11.78 million lei and 68.37 million lei in debts, and a median number of 263 employees.