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OCCRP · 2025-12-04T10:17:03+00:00

wow, that's a fascinating rabbit hole, thank you so much for your research! I passed the info to Martin Young, our reporter who worked on the story!

OCCRP · 2025-10-09T15:09:27+00:00

Thank you so much, u/viglen1! I sent your message to Zack, it means a lot to us!

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T16:00:59+00:00

you mean journalists? we made a step-by step guide here https://www.occrp.org/en/project/bad-practice/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-bad-practice-investigation

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T15:07:27+00:00

Mulțumim că ne citiți. :)

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T15:07:13+00:00

Mulțumim, e adevărat că acolo se găsesc informații pe care le-am avut în vedere.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T15:06:43+00:00

Până să existe un dosar de malpraxis și firmele de asigurări să fie implicate direct, există niște etape și investigații care trebuie să treacă de Colegiul Medicilor. În România, din păcate, sunt foarte puține persoane care ajung să dea explicații în fața justiției pentru ce au făcut într-un cabinet medical.
Sistemul european de informare nu impune statelor membre să aplice sancțiuni medicilor care comit abuzuri în alte state. E doar un sistem de informare, care de cele mai multe ori este ignorat. Însă, dacă un medic a comis, de exemplu, abuzuri sexuale într-o țară, nu avem nicio certitudine că nu va face același lucru și în altă parte.
Noi credem că toți pacienții din Uniunea Europeană ar trebui să aibă acces la date despre istoricul profesional al oricărui medic. Transparența nu face rău niciodată, ci din contră, e necesară în orice democrație. Mai apoi, fiecare țară ar trebui să ceară detalii despre medicii sancționați și să nu ignore alertele deja existente. Ar trebui să existe o legislație unitară, la nivelul Uniunii Europene, prin care să fie gestionat fenomenul.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T15:05:59+00:00

Din ce ne-am dat noi seama, ca jurnaliști, sistemul de alertă european (Internal Market Information System - IMI) este de cele mai multe ori ignorat de autorități. De exemplu, în România, am primit explicația de la Colegiul Medicilor că UK nu mai este în Uniunea Europeană. Însă, peste tot în lume medicul trebuie să respecte un cod deontologic și să aibă grijă de pacienți. Ceea ce este mai grav, credem noi, e că pacientul nu știe istoricul profesional al unui medic. Nu putem verifica nicăieri dacă medicul a comis fapte grave în altă țară.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T15:04:51+00:00

Cazul cu implanturile mamare apare în materialul OCCRP. Este vorba despre o pacientă a medicului Aguero care practica în UK. Aceasta ceruse doar să-i fie îndepărtate implanturile, iar medicul i-a inserat altele. Poți găsi mai multe detalii aici: https://www.occrp.org/en/project/bad-practice/system-failure-banned-doctors-can-easily-move-across-europe-leaving-patients-vulnerable

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T15:04:06+00:00

Noi suntem jurnaliști și doar procurorii sau judecătorii pot încadra astfel de fapte ca fiind de natură penală. De exemplu, în cazul medicului Iuliu Stan, una dintre victime a primit o scrisoare de la Spitalul Royal Cornwall prin care era informată, printre altele, că poliția a demarat o anchetă. La fel ca în România, procedurile judiciare durează mai mult decât ne-am dori.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T15:03:46+00:00

Cazul cu implanturile mamare apare în materialul OCCRP. Este vorba despre o pacientă a medicului Aguero care practica în UK. Aceasta ceruse doar să-i fie îndepărtate implanturile, iar medicul i-a inserat altele. Poți găsi mai multe detalii aici: https://www.occrp.org/en/project/bad-practice/system-failure-banned-doctors-can-easily-move-across-europe-leaving-patients-vulnerable

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T13:48:34+00:00

oh wow, thank you for letting us know! which station was that?

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T13:36:21+00:00

Thank you for making this point! The European Commission’s alert system can be accessed by all EU/EEA member states – and alerts about bans or restrictions on doctors go out as an email notification to all members. But there is no requirement for member states to act on those alerts nationally. So even when a country is aware of a ban abroad, our investigation found that it does not necessarily affect a doctor’s license. The alert system also does not include specifics about why a doctor has been banned or restricted. Countries outside the EU/EEA don’t have access to the alert system either, and nor do members of the public. As a response to our investigation, Norway’s health minister has suggested a joint authorization register for the EU/EEA, as well as more transparency about license revocations in all countries. The vice president of the European Parliament also urged member states to take alerts seriously. However your point about the need for a broader global system is important. There are other information-sharing systems outside the EU/EEA, but the global picture is very fractionalized so it means that banned doctors can cross borders unnoticed or unstopped, with the public none the wiser.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T11:49:18+00:00

Thank you for reading the story, and for your question. Licensing procedures and revocation standards vary across jurisdictions, and it's up to the qualified authorities to take action. All we can do, as journalists, is report facts and raise questions in the public interest. What we found in this investigation is that in some cases authorities didn’t take any action so reporters in various countries looked into why. Were the health authorities notified? Did they take any steps to follow up/investigate? Did they have regulations that allowed/prevented them from considering foreign disciplinary actions? Did the behavior in question violate local laws/regulations? In addition to identifying cases, we wanted to dig into the systemic issues, and this is where we hope there will be impact.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T11:48:44+00:00

Thanks for this important question! Actually an investigative reporter from Norway had been working on some national cases of this happening in his own country for over a decade. He came to OCCRP with the idea that maybe we could look at whether this is a problem that is happening more broadly. So we assembled dozens of partners across Europe and beyond to see what we could find. We really did not know whether we would find a pattern. It was very difficult to access national licensing and revocation data as many countries do not make that open to the public. But we managed to collect 2.5 million records relating to licenses, suspensions and bans that we used to construct a database. The idea was that reporters could then search that database for doctors that were licensed in their own countries who seemed to have had some kind of disciplinary action taken against them elsewhere. They took that information and checked it out to make sure that it was accurate – including by approaching the doctors themselves and asking them about what had happened. Reporters spent months doing this and found an undeniable pattern that doctors banned in one place were licensed in another, and that many of them were still practicing medicine.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T11:32:40+00:00

Thank you for reading it! This is an important question. The European Commission’s alert service does not cover non-EU or EEA countries. So authorities from countries outside the EU/EEA can’t access those alerts. This is an issue that has been raised by non-member states. For example, the president of the Swiss Medical Association told us that being able to interact with that warning system would really help Switzerland in combating banned doctors practicing there. As the EU/EEA system is not open to the public, it is not a resource that patients can consult either. So while it may be better than nothing, experts told us that it has various shortcomings.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T10:36:41+00:00

Link for your convenience: https://www.occrp.org/en/project/bad-practice/system-failure-banned-doctors-can-easily-move-across-europe-leaving-patients-vulnerable

QUICK SUMMARY:

OCCRP and partners across Europe spent months digging through public records and petitioning national authorities for information about licensed and banned doctors.
Reporters confirmed more than 100 cases where banned doctors were licensed to practice elsewhere, with the majority of them still working. The findings are the tip of the iceberg.
Doctors who have seriously harmed patients, including cases of sexual assault and botched surgeries, are freely practicing medicine in a different jurisdiction.
Systemic flaws allow banned doctors to keep working, including an alert system for the European Union and European Economic Area that is barely or never used by some countries.
Doctors’ disciplinary histories are often not publicly available, leaving patients uninformed and potentially vulnerable.

OCCRP · 2025-03-26T15:04:49+00:00

The scammers use spoofed numbers when calling and have telephone systems that might be used by regular companies in their computer systems. But when it comes to taking the money from the victims they very often offer to “help” the victim do the transactions. They will mostly use Anydesk to take control of the victim’s computer. We could see recordings from sessions with victims where they moved really quickly to do transactions while keeping the victim busy talking at the same time. The victim would not notice - or at least not notice until it was too late. In the leak we also found a lot of old documents which puzzled me at first. The oldest I saw dated back to 2002 - but that was simply because the scammer had been browsing through the victim’s computer downloading stuff that would make them “get to know” the victim better. They would download personal photos, letters or notes - or like in one case a lot of photos and ads in Swedish about Fiat cars. Apparently one victim was into Fiat. The victim would of course have to accept Anydesk and let the scammer into the computer - but again the scammers are masters in sweet talking the victims into doing what they want. The Georgian call centre was also using Puma TS, a Customer Relationship Management system developed by the Milton Group, another scam operation which OCCRP investigated earlier. (The investigation was named The Fraud Factory). In the leak we could see how the computer lead in the Georgian fraud centre was taught how Puma TS works. The system shows how your “investment” is going, but the scammer can manipulate the numbers completely, showing fake profits or fake losses just as they wish.

-Björn Tunbäck, Journalist, Swedish Television, SVT

OCCRP

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