Sofia City Court handed out two sentences, one suspended and one of five years imprisonment, to two former top officials of the former National Road Infrastructure Fund (NRIF) on November 24 2008.

Lyubomir Lilov, the former head of the European Union funds directorate at NRIF, who on July 8 2008 pleaded guilty to charges of soliciting a bribe, got one year suspended sentence and a fine of 5000 leva.

Lilov's colleague, Ivan Vladimirov, formerly in charge of allocating funds under the Ispa pre-accession aid programme of the European Union at the Fund, who refused to plead guilty of accepting a bribe, received a sentence of five years imprisonment, a fine of 20 000 leva and three-year ban on working in the construction sector.

Lilov and Vladimirov were arrested in January 2008 after they were caught red-handed receiving a bribe of 25 000 leva, which was the first payment of a total of 50 000 leva the two asked from architect Georgi Yanev, who tipped off the police.

Sofia City Court held its first hearing of the case on July 8, with Vladimirov pleading not guilty on all charges.

Lilov pleaded guilty to charges of soliciting a bribe, but denied the accusation that he intended to use the money to pay a bribe to a colleague to influence the decision to re-zone a land plot.

The case was just another scandal surrounding the NRIF, whose head Vesselin Georgiev was forced to resign as a consequence of an unrelated corruption row, when a journalistic investigation found that he had handed out contracts worth tens of millions of leva to a company on whose board of directors he sat previously and where he was replaced by his brother.

Following the two rows and in an attempt to change the image and restore the European Commission's trust in NRIF as a body capable of transparent allocation of EU funds, the Bulgarian Government replaced the fund with a National Road Infrastructure Agency.