The Bulgarian counterintelligence agency SANS has been accused of failing to thwart an illegal scheme allowing Russians to acquire Bulgarian – and therefore EU citizenship – with the help of false documents.
The accusation was brought on Wednesday (31 January) by the Co-Chairman of the centre-right coalition We Continue the Change – Democratic Bulgaria (PP-DB), Atanas Atanasov, a former head of counterintelligence.
An investigation by Euractiv Bulgaria on the same topic confirmed these accusations.
Atanasov told the national TV channel BNT that an individual of Russian origin, Gleb Mishin, supplied Russian citizens with Bulgarian passports.
“There’s a notorious person here dealing with this. His name is Gleb Mishin, Ukrainian by birth but probably Russian,” Atanasov said.
According to him, Mishin provides “hordes” of Russians with documents that they later use to receive Bulgarian, and therefore, EU citizenship.
Atanasov said Mishin had an office in Moscow where the candidates for Bulgarian citizenship submitted their requests, and he prepared the documents for them and filed them with the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice. In the end, the Russian applicants got Bulgarian citizenship.
According to Atanasov, SANS has been informed about the scandalous scheme, with details about the illicit payments, but has failed to act.
SANS and the Ministry of the Interior conduct preliminary checks on foreigners applying for Bulgarian citizenship.
If these institutions find irregularities or threats to national security, the Ministry of Justice suspends the procedure. The final granting of a Bulgarian passport is done by presidential decree.
“Russia has declared Bulgaria an enemy state, we must be extremely vigilant about what kind of people enter the country. It is alleged that they obtained citizenship with false documents. This is a specific channel for infiltrating people from Russia’s intelligence services in Europe,” Atanasov said.
Russian spies?
Euractiv Bulgaria investigated the scheme for selling Bulgarian citizenship to Russians and citizens of former Soviet republics independently from Atanasov and his presumed sources. The information, however, largely coincides.
Indeed, Gleb Mishin, according to Euractiv sources, is at the centre of the scheme. He also uses other names, such as Semyon Vershinin.
Many of the clients have been lured by Russian websites publishing advertising for obtaining Bulgarian citizenship, claiming that the procedure is legal. The websites stress that Bulgarian citizenship is equivalent to EU citizenship.
For a fee, the client receives a false birth certificate from one of their parents, stating that they are of Bulgarian origin. This document is key for obtaining Bulgarian citizenship.
Euractiv sources said that once the clients obtain the false birth certificate of one of their parents, Mishin-Vershinin provides them with a “corridor” through the Bulgarian administration for an additional fee, the total amount for obtaining citizenship being €8,000.
From samples of documents that Euractiv Bulgaria has seen, the false birth certificates are made to look as if the Ukrainian Soviet Republic issued them.
What indicates that they are fake is that they bear consecutive numbers, regardless of the issue date. This suggests that the falsifiers use a stash of blank documents and pay little attention to whether the papers would later be compared.
According to Euractiv Bulgaria sources, the Ministry of Justice reported the irregularities to SANS, but the response was that applicants for Bulgarian citizenship are standardly checked for possible criminal records, which are never found as the candidates did not live in Bulgaria.
According to official data, the number of Russian citizens who have received Bulgarian citizenship has soared in the last three years.
According to data Euractiv Bulgaria has obtained, Bulgaria may have under reported the number of ‘new’ Bulgarian citizens to Eurostat, the European Commission’s statistics agency.
For example, in 2021, Bulgaria granted citizenship to 14,421 people, while the Eurostat tables show 2,183.
Prime Minister reacts
Asked by Euractiv to comment on the scandal, Bulgarian Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov said he had ordered an investigation and repeated three times that the situation was not normal.
Speaking to the press as he arrived at the EU summit early on Thursday, he said:
“It’s the duty of the (Bulgarian law enforcement) services, when it comes to Russian interests in Bulgaria, when it comes to spying activity, and also when it comes to corruption, to be much more active and to identify the culprits.”
He continued:
“It’s not normal to learn about such cases from the television. It’s normal that the services present (to the Prime Minister) such information. For the time being, I have no such information, pointing at such activity. Again, this is not normal. I have asked an investigation, but it’s not normal that the services keep their eyes shut when it comes to such potential risks for Bulgaria.”
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Alice Taylor]
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