ACF: New Documents Reveal Scandalous Actions of Prosecutor’s Office in Investigation of Eight Dwarfs Case

The Anti-Corruption Fund Foundation (ACF) has released previously unpublished documents which shed new light on the only official investigation of the Eight Dwarfs case^[1] to ever reach the court stage.

 The Eight Dwarfs is a key ACF investigation which showed how officials from the now defunct Specialized Prosecutor’s Office acted illegally for the benefit of one of the parties in a father-son dispute over a family-owned company.

 The documents reveal scandalous actions by prosecutors in the course of the pre-trial proceedings: untenability of the charges against influence trader Petyo Petrov “The Euro”, the prosecution’s main defendant; the presence of the well-establish pattern in the work of prosecutors involving spurts of fervent activity followed by standstill; unfounded decisions as to the targets of procedural action; selectivity in the decisions to drop charges against some defendants; inexplicable decisions to omit the names of certain witnesses such as Marian Naydenov Mladenov, driver of Petrov’s ex-wife, Lubena Pavlova. Marian Marinov is likely the brother of Mladen Naydenov Marinov, former Minister of Interior and present-day politician. While Marian Marinov’s identity was established in the course of the pre-trial proceedings, his name is missing from the indictment where it says the identity of Pavlova’s driver was “unknown”.

 The pre-trial proceedings in case 13904/2021 of the Sofia City Prosecutor’s Office (SCPO) have resulted in a charge in absentia only against Petyo Petrov. This despite  the fact that Petrov’s ex-wife Lubena Pavlova, as well as prosecutors Kiril Peychinov and Dilyan Deyanov, were also briefly brought in as defendants. Subsequently, the charges against Pavlova, Peychinov and Deyanov have been dropped, and they are not named in the indictment. To date, SCPO has not requested the issuance of a European arrest warrant concerning Petyo Petrov whose whereabouts remain unknown.

 The indictment has been lodged with the Sofia City Court, but the hearing is still pending since, at the end of October 2024, the court returned the case to the Prosecutor’s Office citing procedural violations.

 The investigation is related to only one of several different plot lines of the Eight Dwarfs saga. It focuses on some 35 kg of gold and over EUR 500,000 in cash which were seized as physical evidence from Yavor Zlatanov, co-owner of the Izamet group of companies. In violation of the law, prosecutors from now defunct Specialized Prosecutor’s Office (SPO) handed over the seized gold and cash to Iliya Zlatanov, Izamet’s other co-owner, and to businessman and former MP Dimitar Lambovski.

 The documents analyzed and published by the ACF also include the decisions to drop the charges against Kiril Peychinov, Dilyan Deyanov and Lubena Pavlova, as well as protocols from Pavlova’s interrogation and excerpts of the indictment which has been filed in court.

 Today marks the first time when the report of the Inspectorate of the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office of Cassation on the handling of the Eight Dwarfs case by the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office is published in its entirety. Dating back from 2020, this report appeared to be forgotten by the former Prosecutor General Ivan Geshev. Its existence was only publicly mentioned in 2023 by Geshev’s successor Borislav Sarafov as he made promises – yet to materialize – that the Eight Dwarfs case would be thoroughly investigated in a bid to clean up the Prosecutor’s Office.

 The report describes in detail numerous flagrant violations and inexplicable actions by prosecutors from the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office and their supervisors responsible for the criminal proceedings against Yavor Zlatanov. Procedural actions were initiated by the prosecution just several days after Ilia Zlatanov had met Petyo Petrov at The Eight Dwarfs restaurant. At the meeting, Petrov had promised Ilia Zlatanov that “truth would prevail”.

 The documents pertaining to the Sofia City Prosecutor’s Office investigation of Petrov, the sole defendant, reveal the legal untenability of the charges against him. On the other hand, the implicated prosecutors from the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office’s have been presented as the innocent victims of an overly simple scheme orchestrated solely by Petrov, rather than as collaborators.

 “From 2021 when the investigation was launched to 2024 when it was concluded, the actions taken by the prosecution – as revealed by the documents – show an already well-known pattern of freezing of all activity followed by spurts of urgent activity (the so called magic carpet) as well as frequent and inexplicablechanges in the targets of the procedural actions,” said Andrey Yankulov, senior legal expert at ACF. 

 On the other hand, the indictment enriches the picture already painted by Ilia Zlatanov in his interviews for ACF’s video series The Eight Dwarfs. Incredulous as it sounds, the gold was, indeed, handed over at night at the parking lot of the Specialized Court and the Prosecutor’s Office with a prosecutor pushing the trolley – a task typically reserved for office helpers.

“The details mentioned in the indictment reinforce the impression that what took place was a plain midnight robbery, rather than procedural actions,” said Yankulov.

 The documents contain further interesting details. In her statement to interrogators, Petrov’s former wife Lubena Pavlova, at one point also a suspect, is recorded as saying that Petrov had instructed her to set aside five kilograms from the seized gold for “Ivan”, a reference to former Prosecutor General Ivan Geshev. Furthermore, one kilogram was supposed to be set aside for “Mitko”, a prosecutor from the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office.

The claim that the implicated prosecutors from the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office’s were victims of fraud contradicts the facts established in the course of the investigation – and mentioned in the indictment – namely, Petyo Petrov and Dimitar Frantishek Petrov, the then administrative director of the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office, were collaborators. The indictment also contains a detailed description of the actions taken by Dimitar Frantishek Petrov in order to assign the task of the “immediate” handing over of the seized gold to prosecutor Kiril Peychinov. Peychinov’s role in the proceedings was determined in violation of the principle of random allocation of assignments. His actions followed a decision, already issued by prosecutor Deyanov, to return the gold to one of the parties in the ownership dispute. Peychinov was also tasked with “immediately” issuing a decision for the handover of the seized cash.

The documents also point to the inexplicable omission of several implicated individuals from the indictment. One person who was not mentioned was the driver of Lubena Pavlova’s vehicle which was used to transport the seized gold from the parking lot of the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office. As is evident from a report, dated 18 August 2023, and signed by Ivaylo Petrov, the prosecutor overseeing the investigation, the driver was identified as Marian Naydenov Marinov.

It remains unknown what changes in the gathered evidence resulted in the decision to omit Marinov from the indictment. That document, issued by the same prosecutor on 21 June 2024, mentions the identity of the driver as unknown.

What is clear, however, is that, unless there is a highly unlikely coincidence, Ivaylo Petrov’s report confirms information already provided by Iliya Zlatanov in his interviews with ACF where he claimed that the brother of former Minister Interior and long-serving MP Mladen Naydenov Marinov is a police officer and personal driver for Petyo Petrov “The Euro”. 

The analysis of the information from the SCPO case file 13904/2021 can be found here. The copies of the documents are available here.

^[1] The Eight Dwarfs case is told in the four parts of the ACF video investigation: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four, as well as the publications. The whole story of the Eight Dwarfs – everything we couldn’t tell in the films and Yavor Zlatanov’s story to the ACF confirmed the story of the Eight Dwarfs