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Comment by Emilia Milcheva:
The returnee from Dubai, Vasil Bozhkov, nicknamed Skull, accused of several crimes in Bulgaria, gave a press conference only to say that he will participate in politics to remove from power Boyko Borisov, Delyan Peevski and the status quo in general.
There are no convicts
Characters with nicknames who want to enter politics usually stay outside. What to do – life is unfair. They can enter any hotel, casino, restaurant and bar, negotiate with politicians – covertly or openly, finance their campaigns and corrupt them by paying a “quiet fee”. But that’s it.
Like politicians, nicknamed characters have not been convicted of serious crimes such as corruption or being part of a criminal gang. But in the state of Bulgaria, no one has been convicted – if we do not count the regional mayor of “Mladost” Desislava Ivancheva and the kidnapping and murder group “Naglite”, who never released the guarantors of the crimes. Group loyalty? Fear? Bulgaria is the country of hidden truths.
royal “honors”
Twenty years ago, politicians avoided publicly mentioning the name of Vasil Bozhkov – at that time a member of the “Vazrazhdane” business club. The then leader of the SDS, Nadezhda Mihailova, withdrew the mayoral candidate Plamen Oresharski, who met with Bozhkov at the headquarters of his company “Nove Holding” on “Moskovska” Street (where he is now under house arrest). The Blue Party, however, never condemned the clientelism of its own ruling the Capital Municipality.
Simeon of Saxe-Coburggotsky, whose election campaign Bozhkov financed – according to documents leaked to Wikileaks, met the businessman in the form of the “Vazrazhdane” club, in which Emil Külev, Iliya Pavlov, Radosvet Radev, Borislav Dionisiev, the Bobokov brothers and others were also members. And one of the first acts of the NDSV-DPS administration in 2001 was to close the Insurance and Gambling Supervision Agency and create a State Gambling Control Commission under the Minister of Finance. Its first boss was the Saxe-Coburg approved Georgi Petrov (with the unflattering nickname Gosho Tupoto). The Audit Chamber later found serious violations in the work of the DKKH, but so what? The legal order is not inherent to the Bulgarian state.
“Fighters” against the status quo
Like many in the Bulgarian business, Bozhkovia’s roots are in the transition, between the dark and the light, buried in currency operations, duty-free shops, bookmakers, gambling. Flee with his private plane from Bulgaria three years ago, returned from Dubai on a low-cost airline. His short press conference in Sofia showed a tired and weak man, different from the videos from Dubai, therefore unconvincing in the request that he wants to lift up the non-voters in order to win the elections, to remove Borisov and Peevski from the political scene and for Bulgaria to have “some future”. His political project “Bulgarian Summer” failed – it did not arouse much interest, and he did not even manage to open a party account because of the sanctions imposed on Bozhkov both as an individual and on his business under the global “Magnitsky” law.
However, political motives are a good wrapper for real intentions. “Fighter against the status quo” sounds somewhat better than “settling scores”, and gives another image to the image of a defendant. The press conference was expected, but it turned out to be boring, excluding the mention of Peevski next to Borisov. So far, the businessman’s attacks have been directed mainly against the leader of GERB, but also against his finance minister “Vladi” Goranov and his publicist Sevdelina Arnaudova.
Like Bozhkov, Delyan Peevski is sanctioned under the global “Magnitsky” law, but one is under house arrest, with several charges, and the other is a pillar of constitutional reform and a governing majority. It turns out that an unconvicted politician, whose name became a household name for the backstage, has a reserved place in politics, and the unconvicted businessman who worked with him – Bozhkov’s lottery tickets were sold in Peevski’s “Lafki” – is awaiting trial. Is Bulgarian politics or Bulgarian justice the best?
The transmission of the bundles
However, one institution was clearly named by Vasil Bozhkov – the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Department of Finance (OFAC), with whose representatives he had many meetings and handed over documents and records to them. Given his experience with the Bulgarian state machine, they most likely contain information about the “junta that attacked and destroyed him”.
But before the “attack”, his business was flourishing, which was due (and) to Borisov’s management, and the profits were more than good. In 2021, inspections by the State Financial Inspection Agency (FSAI) found that the State Gambling Commission had damaged the budget by nearly BGN 557 million due to less collected gambling fees from the companies associated with Bozhkov – “New Games”. “National Lottery”, “Eurofootball” and “Eurobet”.
The business of the banker Tsvetan Vassilev also flourished, who only after the bankruptcy of KTB saw Peevski as “the face of the deep state” – not while they were partners, and that “the roots go to remnants of the First and Sixth administration of the DS”. He leads his battles against the status quo from Belgrade, where he also received political asylum and is unlikely to return some Friday. His revelations that the face of the “deep state” controlled the South Stream gas pipeline project did not impress the Bulgarian prosecutor’s office.
The roots will be hard to pull out.
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4.6
Rating 4.6 out of 9 votes.
2023-09-12 03:00:00
#Bozhkov #deep #state #roots #hard #pull
