BULGARIA LETTER:Accused racketeers awaiting trial are being granted immunity to run for election, writes DAN McLAUGHLIN
SHOCKED BY the British MPs’ expenses scandal? Spare a thought, then, for voters in the opposite corner of Europe, where several alleged criminals hope to escape jail by running for parliament.
A fortnight before Bulgaria’s general election, businessmen with murky reputations have been released from custody after announcing plans to take part in the ballot. Under local law, their immunity from prosecution lasts until the end of the campaign or, if elected, until the end of their term.
Last week a court granted this immunity to Plamen Galev and Angel Hristov, who face charges of racketeering and running an organised crime group, after they registered as independent candidates in the election.
According to local council officials, the two effectively ran the southwestern town of Dupnitsa for years through contacts in the police, courts and tax authorities.
The embezzlement trial of the former director of the insolvent Kremikovtzi steelworks, Alexander Tomov, was suspended to allow him to run in this month’s European Parliament elections and he is also a candidate in the national vote on July 5th.
Another prospective MP is Ivailo Drazhev, the former head of the Chernomorets soccer club, who is awaiting trial for drink-driving and causing the death of two people in 1998.
He is also charged with siphoning off cash from a Bulgarian company.
The tiny Alliance of Bulgarian Patriots has also complained about a court’s decision not to grant temporary immunity to would-be candidates Vesselin and Hristo Danov, who face jail for crimes including extortion, money laundering and luring people into prostitution. The father and son hoped to run for parliament in the Black Sea city of Varna, where they are both councillors.
While these fledgling politicians insist they are innocent and want to enter parliament only to help their compatriots and their homeland, their involvement in the election has prompted President Georgi Parvanov to lament the legal loopholes that allow them to run for office.
“If we now allow people burdened with heavy sins [to enter parliament], this would not only blacken Bulgaria’s image but would also hurt our perception about democracy profoundly,” he said this week.
“That is why every voter must use their conscience.”
The practice is also troubling Brussels, particularly after the trial of nine Bulgarians for alleged fraud involving €7.5 million of EU farm aid was suspended when one of the accused decided to run for parliament.
The case, which suggests the men profited from buying second-hand equipment and using fake documents to present it as new, prompted the EU to freeze more than €800 million in aid to Bulgaria last year.
Corruption is endemic in Bulgaria, kidnappings are frequent and many high-profile figures in business and crime have been murdered in broad daylight in big cities since the collapse of communism in 1989.
Since then, however, not a single senior official has been convicted of graft and only one major crime boss has been sent to jail.
In a country where grinding poverty rubs up against ostentatious wealth, and the nation’s poorest suffer most from its ubiquitous crime and corruption, it is no surprise that the current Socialist government is expected to lose the election to the party of Boyko Borisov, a straight-talking former bodyguard who is now the mayor of the capital, Sofia.
In what some Bulgarians dismiss as the government’s last-ditch attempt to beat Borisov, ex-deputy interior minister Raif Mustafa was charged this week with helping a businessman offer a €50,000 bribe to the head of the national fisheries agency.
In another eye-catching pre-election move, tax inspectors announced plans to investigate the income of 105 Bulgarian owners of luxury Bentley cars, which sell for some €200,000 in a country where the average monthly wage is about €300.
Flashy cars seem to have a habit of causing trouble for their powerful Balkan owners – and can even hamper nascent political careers.
In Romania, which joined the EU with neighbouring Bulgaria in 2007, outspoken millionaire Gigi Becali faces trial for allegedly having his bodyguards kidnap three men who stole his Mercedes limousine.
The charges come at a particularly inconvenient time for the shepherd-turned-business- man, because the court’s travel ban bars him from taking up the European Parliament seat that he just won for the nationalist Greater Romania Party.
Not a man used to refusals, Becali has promised to put on the “mother of all shows” if anyone tries to stop him going to Strasbourg and Brussels.
“They should come to arrest me from there,” he said.