The Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), a minority partner in Bulgaria's tripartite ruling coalition, is facing a rash of public scandals and allegations of corruption.

The MRF, which is led and supported mainly by Bulgarians of ethnic Turkish descent, has been the subject of allegations for years, but a new avalanche started after party leader Ahmed Dogan's assistant Ahmed Emin committed suicide in Dogan's home on October 17.

Since that day, politicians from rival parties and former MRF members have been accusing Dogan of almost everything under the sun, but with corruption as the most popular accusation.

The latest allegation follows several months of effort by right-wing minority opposition party the Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria (DSB) whose leader Ivan Kostov once called Dogan "Bulgaria's curse". DSB MP Atanas Atanasov, who was head of the National Intelligence Service at the time that Kostov was prime minister (1997/2001) has been alleging for months that there was an investigation against the MRF code-named "Liana".

Atanasov said that the investigation had to do with the funding of the MRF, and more precisely, how the party used its position to profit by serving as an intermediary between businesses and the state in MRF-controlled ministries. The Liana investigation's existence was confirmed by Vanyo Tanov, a former top Interior Ministry official, who declined to say why, some time after it started in 2006, it had been put on hold.

Coincidence or not, but several former MRF members told the Bulgarian media that Dogan and the MRF had served as a business consultancy on a number of deals. Kerim Karaali, who claimed to have been Emin's predecessor, told commercial Nova Televisia that prior to 2001, when the MRF was still in opposition, it had served as an intermediary in an oil deal between Russia's Gazprom and Turkey. At the time, there was a special MRF business information centre that raised money for the party, Karaali said.

On November 17, Yordan Yordanov, who said that he had headed the business centre from 1995 to 1999, told Bulgarian-language Trud daily that the centre had served as the link between the MRF and businesses, but denied it had been involved in the Gazprom deal. Dogan has denied all the allegations and has asked authorities to investigate them. If, however, what Tanov says is true, there was just such an investigation, but it did not get very far.