Who takes people to court

Three companies, almost two thirds of the claims

The list of filers is long: banks, power and broadband providers, payday lenders, town halls, residents' associations. But the volume sits with a few names. Best Capital filed 75,115 claims, InvestCapital 53,434 at 175 courts, and the broadband provider Digi 31,873. Together that is 64% of all claims. Fourth is ACOD, a Bulgarian debt buyer and collector, with 22,295.

Best Capital also appears in the records under its old name, Kredyt Inkaso: the company joined the Polish BEST group in 2025 and was renamed in December 2025. InvestCapital, a Malta-based company of the KRUK group, appears represented by Kruk România. Both buy overdue debts from banks and other businesses and then seek payment as the new creditors. For the person summoned to court, the claimant is often a company they never signed anything with.

Best Capital is the top filer in 126 of the 170 areas on the map. No bank is in the top ten.

What they claim: 78% are small claims

A small claim (cerere de valoare redusă) is a mainly written procedure for sums up to 50,000 lei (about £7,800), not counting interest and costs; the limit was 10,000 lei until 15 May 2025. The claimant fills in a form, and the court calls the parties in only if needed. In 2025 companies and institutions filed 195,968 of them against private people.

Garnishment validations (37,917) ask the court to order an employer, bank or other third party to carry out a garnishment of someone's wages or account that it has failed to apply. Money claims (pretenții, 13,807) are ordinary suits for payment, of debts or damages. Payment orders (4,486, with European payment orders) are a simplified procedure for documented money debts that are due.

Only new first-instance claims are counted, and only those where every defendant is a private person. Challenges, appeals and annulments are left out. A case sent on to another court is counted once, where it lands.

Same claim, different outcome

When a judge grants a small claim, the claim can be granted in full or only in part: the judge may award the debt but not the penalties added on top, for instance. Of the 168,151 claims filed in 2025 and decided on the merits by October 2026, 53% were granted only in part.

The national figure hides courts at opposite ends. The chart below has one dot for each court with at least 30 such claims. At 51 of them the share granted in part is clearly below the national figure; at 95 it is clearly above. A court is named here only when the difference is clear.

The differences cluster by county: in Bistrița-Năsăud and Vâlcea only about 3% and 5% of claims are granted in part, in Argeș and Covasna about 73% and 80%. This pattern surfaced after the test was fixed, so it is an observation, not a finding.

The records do not say why courts rule differently, and this page does not guess. At the courts in the lists, an automated sample of the solution summaries on the portal, 15 per label, shows that the label fits: where a claim is "granted", the summary almost never rejects any part of it (once in 180); where it is "granted in part", the summary usually rejects the rest. Two courts failed the check and are left off the lists: at Agnita the summaries say only "granted in part", and at Câmpulung too many summaries do not show which part was rejected.

The claims do not follow poverty

The starting question was whether poorer areas are sued more often. The test was written before the 2025 data was opened: debt claims per 10,000 residents, compared with the area's local development index, between areas in the same county.

The result: no clear link. The correlation within counties is -0.14, with an interval from -0.32 to 0.07. The poorest third of the population lives in areas with 145 claims per 10,000 residents, the middle third 131, the richest 121: a gap that the comparison within counties does not confirm. The differences between areas are large, from 35 in the Dragomirești area to 358 in the Lehliu Gară area, and the test does not establish a link between them and area poverty.

The local human development index (Sandu, 2018) is the latest computed for every commune. A null result does not prove poverty is irrelevant; it shows only that, across court areas, the number of claims does not follow it.

Fines turned into community work

When a fine stays unpaid and cannot be recovered by enforcement, the local authority's responsible department asks the court to replace it with community work (Government Ordinance 2/2001, art. 9). In 2025 there were 29,724 such requests.

These do not follow poverty either: the correlation within counties is -0.20, with an interval that touches zero (-0.38 to 0.01), so it falls short of the bar set in advance. Nor are they concentrated in a few institutions: the top five filed 17% of requests. The most active:

1. Comuna Tâmboești1,349
2. Municipiul Râmnicu Vâlcea1,277
3. Municipiul Câmpina1,067
4. Municipiul Focșani720
5. Comuna Apața630
6. Direcția de Impozite și Taxe Locale Sector 5 București521
7. Orașul Băbeni439
8. Municipiul Sfântu Gheorghe438

The records do not show why one institution files more requests than another. Names are as recorded: Municipiul = city, Comuna = commune, UAT = local authority, Direcția de Impozite și Taxe Locale = local tax office. Institutions recorded under two names are counted together.

What the data does not show

• The page counts claims, not people. One person can face several claims, and one claim can name several defendants.
• The portal records do not say whether the defendant answered, came to court or lost by default.
• The amount claimed is not in the portal data, so what these claims are worth is unknown.
• The names of the people sued were never kept. Only companies and institutions appear on the page. Bailiffs' and lawyers' offices are counted together, because they carry personal names.
• The rule that tells companies from people was checked by hand on 338 names. None of the 243 personal names was taken for a company. A few companies were taken for people, among them ACOD and some bailiffs' offices, so their cases (23,423) were added through a separate search by name. Small companies may still be missed, so the totals are, if anything, slightly low.
• The "granted in part" share comes from the solution label on the portal. It was checked against a sample of rulings at the courts named, not at every court.

Method

The source is the court portal's public web service (portalquery.just.ro), queried for each of the 179 local courts, month by month, for every case registered in 2025: 1,164,839 cases. For each case the object, stage, latest solution and the claimant's name were kept, the name only if it is a company or an institution.

A debt claim here is a new first-instance case whose object is a small claim, a garnishment validation, a money claim, or a payment order or notice, brought by a company or institution against defendants who are all private people. Firms that claim flight compensation from airlines are left out.

The tests were written and frozen on 24 October 2026, before the 2025 data was opened. Correlations are Spearman, with ranks centred by county, 10,000 within-county permutations and 2,000 resamples for the interval. Court intervals are Wilson; a court is named only if its interval misses the national figure.

Cross-check: Best Capital's claims counted in the full census (84,060) match a separate search by the company's name (84,061), court by court.

Population comes from the 2021 census, court areas from Government Decision 1.217/2023. Four courts on the portal's list (Bozovici, Însurăței, Murgeni, Șomcuta Mare): the portal returned no case registered there in 2025, and Decision 1.217/2023 assigns them no locality, so the page counts 175 courts.

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Sources

• Romanian courts portal, public query service (portalquery.just.ro)
• Government Decision 1.217/2023 on local-court districts (legislatie.just.ro)
• Romanian Civil Procedure Code: small claims (arts. 1026–1033), payment orders (art. 1014 ff.), garnishment validation (art. 790)
• Law 57/2025: small-claims limit raised to 50,000 lei
• Government Ordinance 2/2001 on minor offences
• Dumitru Sandu, local human development index 2018
• National Institute of Statistics, 2021 census
• Map of local courts, on this site