Teodor Nita, the prosecutor in charge with investigating the case of 16 waste containers unloaded on Thursday in the Port of Constanta from a Dutch vessel coming from the UK and declared in the shipping documents as carrying second-hand household items, said on Friday that this appears to be just one of several similar transports made lately, and that another roughly 50 containers with waste arrived in Romania when the UK was still in the European Union.

"We have examined the risk analysis document worked out by the Coast Guard police; now, that the UK is out of the EU, certain issues that previously went untracked because of their EU membership have surfaced. According to the risk analysis, there was a high risk that this was a waste shipment, which is why we proceeded to on-site checking. This is the fifth shipment, if I am not mistaken, performed under similar conditions, we'll check to see where the other 50 containers with waste have ended up. There were 16 containers in this shipment. We unsealed just one in the beginning, we found there was an issue with it and had the rest of the containers unloaded and checked their contents. The statements in the accompanying documents were completely different from what was really inside the containers," the prosecutor told a press conference.According to him, the waste shipments are not sent directly to Romania from the shipper, but are unloaded and reloaded in several ports for the authorities to "lose their track".He mentioned that there was just a small amount of usable, marketable merchandise in the shipment, while the rest was waste, and that Romania risks to become the "trash bin" of Europe and not only.Two Romanians and a British citizen are being investigated for illegally importing waste to Romania, after the border police found 16 containers with waste unloaded in the Constanta South Agigea Port from a Dutch ship, and which were listed as carrying second-hand household items in the accompanying documents, the Coast Guard reported on Thursday evening.The illegal import was made by a company that has work points in Bucharest and Ilfov County.

AGERPRES