Bulgaria’s largest GERB party leader Boyko Borissov, the parliamentary backbone of the country’s new pro-EU government, is waiving his parliamentary immunity to continue the money laundering investigation against him – known as ‘Barcelonagate’ –, he announced on Wednesday.
The investigation began nearly three years ago, while Borissov was still Prime Minister when a video was shared in an anonymous Facebook group about a luxury property in a wealthy suburb of Barcelona where former Bulgarian model Borislava Yovcheva lived with her child. The anonymous clip hinted that the child was Borissov’s, which he has always denied.
“After all, I am Boyko Borisov. I will give my immunity, despite the obvious things done by the then chief prosecutor against me,” said Borissov and added: “But I trust both the Bulgarian court and the Bulgarian prosecutor’s office. I will not be a victim of blackmail and extortion.”
So far, Borissov has been reluctant to waive his immunity, worried that the prosecutor’s office will launch an illegal crackdown against him and GERB with an unclear political goal. Only after the dismissal of the chief prosecutor Ivan Geshev, who this year declared himself an enemy of Borissov, the leader of GERB changed his mind and announced that he would waive his immunity.
The Barcelonagate case was first investigated by the Spanish prosecutor’s office, which found indirect traces of money laundering, but without connecting it directly to Borisov, and in 2021 the investigation was transferred to Bulgaria.
The Bulgarian prosecutor’s office began to show public activity in the Barcelonagate investigation in May 2023 after Borisov’s party announced that it supports the long-awaited judicial reform in the country, aimed at reducing the powers of the Bulgarian Prosecutor General Ivan Geshev. Immediately after that, Geshev threatened to clean up the “political garbage”, but then the prosecutor was fired for inadmissible political statements.
Before the chief prosecutor was fired, more than 600 pages of evidence were submitted to the Bulgarian parliament, which accompanied the request to remove Boyko Borissov’s immunity.
“The history of the “Barcelonagate” affair is related to the presence of the Russian company Lukoil in the country while Borissov was PM,” an MP who is familiar with the documents against Borissov told EURACTIV.
The house in Barcelona was bought in 2013 by the Bulgarian businessman Alexander Chaushev, but the money was secured by a money transfer from the company “Tera Tour Service”, whose owner is Valentin Zlatev, the prosecutor’s documents say, as quoted by Bird.bg.
Zlatev was a former long-time executive director of Lukoil Bulgaria, Borissov stated that they were close and played cards together. Valentin Zlatev was among the witnesses who were already questioned by the prosecution in the Barcelonagate case, and after questioning, he said that there was nothing special in this case.
The publicly known facts of the case so far do not lead to a connection between Borissov and the house in Barcelona, despite the claims of the prosecutor’s office. Borissov himself denies having anything to do with the house and model Borislava Yovcheva but refused to give a DNA test to establish paternity.
During Borissov’s rule, with small interruptions from 2009 to 2021, Lukoil Bulgaria was the company with the largest revenues in the poorest EU country, usually over EUR3 billion a year. However, the company regularly made losses and did not pay profit tax in Bulgaria, and the GERB government refused to provide publicly the reports from tax audits of the largest oil refinery in the Balkans.
(Krassen Nikolov | EURACTIV.bg)
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Source: euractiv.com
