The indictment about the Belene Nuclear Power Plant filed on the sly; one minister dropped from the list of indicted
On February 8, 2021, the Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Bulgaria informed in a press release that it had filed criminal proceedings of 546 volumes in the Specialized Criminal Court about unregulated management of hazardous waste against six persons, indicated by the respective initials. The media immediately spread the information that it was an investigation against the Bobokovi brothers. The next day the case was publicly distributed in the Specialized Court.
It is an interesting fact that according to the Specialized Criminal Court’s online record-keeping system, on the same date, a case was received, with a number 246/2021, of 349 volumes for substantial mismanagement, which is a particularly serious case. However, the Prosecutor’s Office did not send any press release about it. The indictment is based on a file of the “Specialized” department of the Sofia City Prosecutor’s Office (SGP) and based on the initials of the four accused persons R.С.О., П.В.Д., М.В.П, and Л.М.В. it can be concluded that this is the investigation into the Belene Nuclear Power Plant case. It is one of the 40 most significant investigations into alleged high-level corruption, which we described in the ACF Annual Monitoring Report 2019 (pp. 59-61 and 86).
In 2016, the Sofia City Prosecutor’s Office announced that it had brought in three former ministers – Delyan Dobrev, Rumen Ovcharov and Petar Dimitrov, and two former executive directors of the National Electricity Company – Mardik Papazyan and Lyubomir Velkov – and accused them of mismanagement concerning the Belene NPP project. The alleged damage suffered by the state amounted to an impressive sum of over BGN 500,000,000. After 2016, no further information was published about the progress of this investigation. No information was provided to us even after two inquiries for the purposes of preparing the ACF’s annual monitoring report.
It remains unclear why, despite the tremendous public interest, in this case, it was treated differently, for example, than the Bobokovi case, which was filed in the Specialized Court on the same day, February 8 – and the institutions did not fail to inform the public.
The other important question is what happened to the accusation against former Minister Delyan Dobrev, also accused in the Belene NPP case? The court system’s reference shows that a person with his initials has not been brought to court in this case.
