Ex-ONJN chief defends tenure, warns against sidelining gambling addicts

Vlad-Cristian Soare, who led Romania's gambling regulator ONJN for 16 months, has given his fullest account yet of his sudden removal from the role earlier this year, in an interview with Romanian outlet Adevărul reported by SBC News.

Soare was appointed ONJN president on 17 April 2025, inheriting a regulator reeling from a PR crisis after an independent audit uncovered roughly €900m in missing taxes. He was later removed from the presidency with, as he said on social media at the time, no clear reason given.

Asked whose interests his work may have disrupted, Soare told Adevărul the answer lay in the measures he introduced, pointing to "those who stood to gain from a lack of digitalisation, an absence of transparency, oversight vulnerable to external influence, legislative interpretations favouring certain operators, or the persistence of mechanisms that allowed for the evasion of tax obligations."

Among the changes he cited were mandatory QR codes and geolocation tags on gaming machines, intended to establish an accurate count of legal equipment in Romania, alongside an overhaul of ONJN's internal IT controls and the creation of a centralised, publicly accessible self-exclusion registry.

Soare said he did not claim to have fixed every problem at the regulator but that he had amended legislation, taken key decisions and left behind projects ready for immediate rollout.

His tenure also saw ONJN launch the "Conscious and Free" programme, which allocated €5m in direct government funding as grants for problem gambling initiatives. The scheme drew suspicion at the time over possible ties between some approved organisations and the gambling industry, with recipients identified only by codes rather than named publicly.

ONJN's current president, Valentin-Ioan Tomescu, has since said the regulator will launch a full inspection of the programme, citing questions over the transparency of the coding process and the handling of funding commitments.

Soare pushed back on that framing, saying the use of codes was "a procedural measure specifically designed to limit access to the project details by ONJN staff or management," with evaluation carried out by independent experts. He said a separate budgetary issue, concerning how the funds were categorised for disbursement, had been raised with the Ministry of Finance and a legislative fix formulated before contracting could proceed.

He argued that distinction had not been made clear enough publicly, saying it was "one thing to have a technical, legal, or budgetary issue that must be resolved prior to contracting, but it is quite another to create the impression that the program was launched without any financial foundation."

Soare closed with a direct appeal to ONJN's current leadership not to let people affected by gambling addiction become, in his words, collateral damage of changes at the top. He said that despite no longer holding the presidency, he retained a public duty to explain what had been achieved and why the institution's work should continue.