October 5, 2021
20:44
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Bulgaria will not receive the requested gold and silver from Russia, because against them it has received their value in international currency, the Russian magazine “Arguments and Facts” writes. FOCUS News Agency presents the answer to the question “What gold does Bulgaria want from Russia?” without editorial intervention:
Bulgaria’s right to ask Russia for 22 tons of gold and 50 tons of silver was recognized by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). He ruled that Moscow should return the former Bulgarian assets, which the USSR bought at the expense of the foreign debt, to the former Bulgarian Tsar Simeon II (Simeon Borisov Saxe-Coburg-Gotha), who filed a lawsuit.
In 1960, the State Bank of the USSR complied with the request of the Bulgarian National Bank and repaid the country’s Western loans by buying gold and silver. They paid for them in convertible currency at the market rate. In the 1990s, Bulgarians overturned a decision to sell the Soviet Union’s gold reserves, and the ECtHR ordered the Bulgarian government to pass a law restitution of royal property, requiring the precious metals to be returned to the former monarch, who US citizen.
“The deal between Bulgaria and the USSR was in accordance with international law,” said Valeri Abramov, chief researcher at the Institute for the Study of International Economic Relations of the University of Finance under the Government of the Russian Federation.
It was not our country that confiscated the gold and silver from the king, but Bulgaria, and it handed them over to the USSR not just like that, but receiving their value in foreign currency. The claim of the former tsar is legitimate only with regard to the property located on the territory of Bulgaria, but not in Russia. Furthermore, the ECtHR has no right to hear such disputes, this is not economic arbitration. Finally, the Russian Federation has priority over national legislation over international law. So Bulgaria will not receive gold from us, concluded Abramov.
