He is a breeding engineer by training, graduating in 1980 from the Frunze Agricultural Institute – currently the Moldovan State Agricultural University in Chisinau. Upon completion of higher studies, Stefan Panis worked in a Soviet collective farm in Causeni District, and later in Floresti District. In the 1990s he was promoted to deputy manager of the Marculesti Collective Farm in Floresti, and two years later he took over as its chief manager.

In 1999, Mr. Panis founded a firm called Panclip SRL, which he ran until 2019. The business is centered on cereal growing. Between 2015 and 2019, he earned more than 3.2 million lei in dividends alone, and in 2020 he collected another half a million lei from the lease of farmland.

In 2007, Stefan Panis was elected a district councilor in Floresti, as a member of the Moldovan Communists Party. In the 2010 parliamentary polls, he sided by the Moldovan Democratic Party (PDM), but did not pass the threshold. However, at the 2011 local elections, he got a new mandate as a councilor in Floresti District on a PDM ticket. In 2012 he was voted as the chairman of this district. He kept the mandate at the 2015 and 2019 elections.

While being employed in a public office, Mr. Panis all that period continued running his business, something that is forbidden by law. He quit the management job in Panclip SRL only in May 2019, although his bio on the Floresti District Council’s official website states that he left Panclip on the day he became the district’s chairman.

In November 2021, the National Integrity Authority (ANI) launched a probe into the reported incompatibility of Mr. Panis’ cumulation of private activity and public office and in February 2022 its inspectors confirmed the incompatibility status. If the findings stay in place, Stefan Panis is due to be dismissed from all public posts and to get a three-year ban in public administration.

That was not the first time Stefan Panis has been screened by ANI. In 2015 it found that he under-reported more than 1.6 million lei in revenues, as well as a difference of some 270,000 lei – that last amount was expected to be confiscated in compliance with existing laws. Prosecutors filed a criminal case on this incident and stopped shortly because Mr. Panis “was at his first deviation from this light offense and admitted his guilt.”

Stefan Panis left the ranks of PDM in August 2020 and implicitly the chairmanship of the party branch in Floresti. Along with other ex-PDM fellows he criticized what they called “the disregard of PDM leadership for voters’ interests” and walked as politically non-affiliated.

Stefan Panis has been awarded the Order of Honor in 2011 by then-acting president Marian Lupu and the Labor Glory Order in 2020 from then-president Igor Dodon.

Mr. Panis owns more than 500 hectares of farmland, most of which was acquired after 2011.