Bulgaria, which has not yet sanctioned any Russian assets, does not have an accurate picture of the scale and nature of Russian investment in the country’s economy, Justice Minister Maria Pavlova said in response to a parliamentary question.
A total of 4,492 companies with Russian participation in Bulgaria own land, but there is no information on how much of these assets are agricultural fields, pastures or forests.
At the end of August, Moody’s reported that Bulgaria had the second-highest number of Russian-owned companies in the EU after Czechia. Pavlova said that the number of such companies was close to 12,000.
“Until 2018, there was no requirement in Bulgaria to indicate the nationality of the real estate buyer,” said Pavlova.
The absence of such a requirement in Bulgarian law is inexplicable, given the EU sanctions regime adopted in 2014 against Russia for its annexation of Crimea.
Since 2018, the year property buyers had to declare their nationality, Russians have bought 7,472 properties. However, the government does not know which properties were purchased by Russians before 2018.
According to official statistics from the Bulgarian National Bank, Russian investment in Bulgaria has steadily declined since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022.
In the first half of 2024, most foreign investment in Bulgaria came from the Netherlands (€269.5 million), Austria (€225 million) and Greece (€160.5 million), while the largest outflow was Russian capital – €184.4 million was withdrawn by Russian companies.
Research by Euractiv shows that Bulgaria has so far not sanctioned Russian nationals and their property in the country, as parliament has refused to pass the necessary legislation to implement European sanctions.
In January, a court in Sofia ruled that large buildings owned by the Russian state could be seized under European sanctions, but this has not happened so far.
Five years ago, the Russian Consulate General in Bulgaria announced that more than 400,000 citizens of the Russian Federation owned nearly 500,000 properties in eastern Bulgaria. The Russian consulate estimated the value of property bought by Russians in the country to be €15 billion, but these figures have never been officially confirmed.
(Krassen Nikolov | Euractiv.bg)
Source: euractiv.com
