He Claimed He Flew for Air Canada. He Was Delivering Pizza. Now He's Moldova's Biggest Political Scandal
The MoldATSA scandal isn't just about a fake pilot. It's about who let him in — and why nobody is being held accountable
A Moldovan national who faked an Air Canada pilot career - while actually driving pizza deliveries and logging hours on Microsoft Flight Simulator - has triggered the most damaging governance scandal to hit President Maia Sandu’s pro-EU government since it came to power.
The details, unearthed by Moldovan investigative outlet ZdG and amplified by Moldova Matters, the English-language Substack covering Moldovan affairs, are almost comic in their audacity. Dumitru Vangheli was appointed director of MoldATSA, the state enterprise managing Moldova’s airspace, in 2025 following a competition organised by the Public Property Agency. On his CV, he claimed to have obtained an ATPL - the highest grade of pilot’s licence, requiring 1,500 hours of flight time and qualifying the holder to fly commercial airliners - from the prestigious CargAir Piloting School in St. Hubert, Canada. He further claimed to have worked as a co-pilot for Air Canada between 2012 and 2014, flying ATR-72 and Boeing 737 Next Generation aircraft.
None of it was true. ZdG found that Vangheli did attend some part-time flying lessons at CargAir - but in 2018, six years after he claimed to have graduated, and he never attained even a basic pilot’s licence. Air Canada confirmed he had never worked for them. They also pointed out something that anyone familiar with their fleet would have spotted immediately: Air Canada operated neither ATR-72 nor Boeing 737 Next Generation aircraft at the time. A childhood friend who lived alongside Vangheli in Montreal filled in the real picture: he was fired from a hotel job, worked a pizza delivery route, and eventually declared bankruptcy - discharging nearly $100,000 CAD in debt. His actual aviation training, the friend told ZdG, consisted of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
The Air Canada connection adds an almost surreal layer. While Vangheli was falsely claiming to have flown for the airline, a real Air Canada captain was allegedly doing something much more brazen. Geoffrey Wall was arrested on June 1 after investigators say he captained over 900 domestic and international flights between 2009 and 2025 without ever obtaining the proper licence or completing mandatory testing - earning nearly $3 million Canadian dollars in the process. The false credentials only came to light during a routine operational evaluation at Toronto Pearson in 2025, when anomalies were detected in his pilot licence documentation. Peel Regional Police dubbed the investigation “Project Icarus.”
The parallel is uncomfortable. If a major Western airline with rigorous oversight can fail to detect fraudulent credentials for nearly seventeen years, it raises an obvious question: how many Vanghelis might be sitting in positions of authority across governments, state enterprises and institutions where vetting is far less rigorous — and the scrutiny far more forgiving?
The Vanghelis story might have remained a colourful embarrassment. Instead it has blown open something uglier: a pattern of cronyism and weak governance inside institutions that Moldova’s Western backers have preferred not to examine too closely.
The fallout has been rapid. A senior ruling-party MP who recommended Vangheli for the role has resigned his parliamentary committee chairmanship. Two cousins of President Sandu have stepped down from public positions. A separate investigation revealed that the husband of one cousin conducted business with a sanctions-listed individual tied to an alleged network supplying military technology to Russia.
The presidential administration’s response has done little to reassure. When pressed on the number of relatives holding state positions, the Presidency told reporters that Sandu has 24 cousins, only two of whom hold public roles - a claim investigators promptly contradicted, finding at least two more on the state payroll. The MoldATSA board of directors, which selected Vangheli and approved ballooning salary increases under his watch, has faced no consequences whatsoever.
Vangheli himself appears unbothered. Despite being fired, and despite ZdG's investigation systematically dismantling his entire professional history, his LinkedIn profile still lists him as CEO of MoldATSA - the Moldovan Air Traffic Services Authority - with no indication that anything has changed.
That last point matters. Moldova Matters editor David Smith, who has covered the story in depth, argues the scandal exposes a structural problem: MoldATSA’s board is neither independent nor qualified, stocked instead with junior civil servants for whom the positions serve as salary top-ups. Nobody has been held accountable because, in any meaningful sense, nobody was ever really accountable.
And yet there is another way to read this. Some observers argue that the scandal's very exposure is a sign that Moldova's anti-corruption instincts are functioning - however imperfectly. Investigative journalists at ZdG and TV8 dug out the story; officials did resign; the fake director was removed. It is a pattern that echoes, on a smaller scale, Ukraine's Operation Midas - one of the most high-profile anti-corruption investigations since the start of the Russian invasion, in which NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office conducted more than 70 searches and exposed a sprawling kickback scheme inside the state nuclear energy company Energoatom. The European Commission's response was pointed but measured: the investigation proved that anti-corruption bodies "work," while stressing that continuous efforts remain a core requirement of the EU accession process. The same argument could be made for Moldova - that sunlight, however uncomfortable, is the system doing its job. TV8 investigative journalist Mariana Rata - who is advocating for the removal of Constantin Batin from the directorship of of the Free Economic Zone Expo-Business-Chisinau - put it simply on social media: "This summer came with a cold shower over the government. I hope it will be a cleansing and refreshing shower. We want in 2030 in EU!"
For Sandu - who has built her entire political brand on anti-corruption and EU accession - the timing is brutal. Moldova is a EU membership candidate, and the government is regularly held up in Western capitals as a model reformist administration in a difficult neighbourhood. This scandal offers an uncomfortable peek at dirty laundry that has been quietly festering beneath that image.
It also hands a gift to those who would rather Moldova not move west at all. Pro-Russian voices inside the country and beyond have long argued that the Sandu government is a Western-backed facade. Scandals involving sanctions-linked business dealings, nepotism, and a fabricated CV at a nationally critical infrastructure agency are precisely the ammunition they will reach for - and reach for loudly.
The question now is whether accountability follows, or whether the story gets managed down. Either way, Moldova’s friends in Brussels and Washington may want to ask harder questions than they have been.
*World Briefing reached out to the Office of the President of Moldova but had not received a response as of publication time.
Reporting drawn from Moldova Matters and its citations of original investigations by ZdG and TV8.
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The journals….
