> As a rule, when Moldova is in the news, it is rarely good news.

That, unfortunately, is exactly true. I was lucky to emigrate as a child, and my sad, cynical reaction to whenever I see "Moldova" on a page out of a corner of my eye is "oh boy, this is going to be a good one" -- not because I wish them ill, but because the only real hope there is for individuals who can emigrate, not for the country. Fortunately, Romania is handing out citizenships to any Moldovan that cares to ask (in Romanian), and throughout the nineties and the naughts hundreds of thousands of Moldovans have been working throughout Russia, Ukraine and the EU. The remittances from emigres to their relatives left behind are a significant part of all money flows into the country.

I can't see any path forward for them until they become part of either Romania or Russia, whole or in pieces. That, in turn, won't happen, partly for geopolitical reasons, and partly because small new nations are fucked in the head and will rather cut their own balls off than let go of any territory. Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia are excellent post-soviet examples: to continue the unfortunate metaphor, the respective sets of balls (which Russia's got a firm grasp on through military presence and financial assistance) are the separatist Transnistria, Eastern Ukraine, Abkhasia and Ossetia. This is a clever technique, and the fact that it's by now simultaneously well-understood and consistently successful unfortunately suggests that these countries' geopolitical limbo is partly of their own making.

The kind of news that pop up are:
- Moldovan police arrest a guy looking for a buyer for 2 kg of plutonium in his car
- Moscow road police arrest a Moldovan for naked drunk-driving
- A sad, sad, hopeless BBC documentary about an orphanage 30km away from the capital that the foreign volunteers come to renovate and donate mattresses and toys to, only to find the toys gone and building materials stolen when they come back for a visit six months later.
- Moldova becomes one of the desperately poor countries chosen for Michelle Obama's program that supports the education of girls.

I remember being surprised when I saw Moldova declared the poorest country in Europe -- we were far from rich, but we lived in the capital and my parents shielded us well. Unfortunately, Moldova shows up at the top of that ranking year after year, except for apparently 2015, when Ukraine's economy took a hit bad enough to earn it this dubious honor. The underlying reality is that life outside the capital is extremely hard, life in the capital is just hard, and the rules of the game are set by the elites that own whatever little wealth is to be found in Moldova.

More to the point regarding the OP of the thread, the capital, Chișinău, and its power and business community, is so small that in the very best scenario of a successful intervention from the outside, their long- and medium- term survival chances are zero. Any Moldovan company's most valuable business asset is the right connections, and apparently that's the asset that RIT Labs no longer has. If they really don't have any funds stashed outside of Moldova, they're completely out of their minds. In any case, they really should realize they're de-facto already insolvent and focus on how to setup their business outside the country and ask their supporters to help them with that. It's extremely sad, but they couldn't have possibly not known what country they were operating in (for nearly twenty years now) and what the risks are.