Four months after Parliament adopted the new Amnesty Act, the law found its way into the European Commission’s interim report on the state of Bulgaria’s judiciary and law enforcement, published on July 22. Sadly, and quite predictably, the EC found it hard to accept some of the act’s provisions, especially those that grant amnesty from prosecution to public officials who have committed a crime of negligence prior to July 1 2008 and if that crime carries a sentence of up to five years under the Penal Code.

According to the report, this text sent a mixed political message to the outside world and could lead to public officials, charged with malfeasance or abuse of public funds, escape justice. Indeed, the law sets a time frame of July 1 2008, which incidentally coincides with the time when the EC decided to freeze hundreds of millions of EU funds to Bulgaria over doubts in its abilities to use the money in a transparent way, which was another way of saying that the EC did not trust the country’s public administration. Now, however, this very same public administration would be able to avoid investigations by using the Amnesty Act as  protection.

Fearing such an outcome, the EC was quick to announce in May this year that the new law might lead to such a situation. This was not done on the record, but through Bulgarian media sources in Brussels, who said that cases against Bulgarian senior civil servants for allegedly defrauding European Union funds may end in amnesty. For this to happen, all that public officials would need to do would be to prove that they were not cautious enough when working with EU funds.

Another interesting fact is that the new law went into force just months ahead of Parliament elections. The party of Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov won the elections with promises of a full revision of the work of the outgoing Cabinet of Sergei Stanishev and bringing to justice people whose actions resulted in the loss of taxpayers money.

Although the new act has not been enforced yet in a case investigating EU funds fraud, its provisions are more than enough reason for prosecutors not to charge public officials. "If this law did not exist, we could have had more than enough reasons to start legal actions against public officials," Margarita Popova, head of the newly-formed unit of investigation of crimes against the financial system of the EU at the Prosecutor-General’s Office told Bulgarian-language daily Dnevnik on July 19.

Popova’s work was one of the few things that the EC report highlighted as positive in the work of Bulgaria’s judiciary and law enforcement, praise which Borissov appreciated by nominating her to be  justice minister in his cabinet. And since Borissov still has fighting corruption at the top of his agenda, it appears that Popova could prove the right choice for the job, which would inevitably include an amendment to the Amnesty Act.

Amnesty Act in action
Since it came into force, the Amnesty Act has been used in several high-profile cases showing how it can be used as a legal means to end investigations and court trials.
One such case was the one against Veliko Turnovo mayor Roumen Rashev, who was accused of mismanagement that had led to the loss of 372 000 leva for the municipality, a crime that could mean up to five years in jail. On June 4, however, prosecutors had to drop the case because it fell under Amnesty Act.

On April 30, the Amnesty Act was invoked in another high-profile case when five people who were charged with criminal negligence while in office were partially acquitted by the court in the case of embezzlement at Sofia’s heating utility Toplofikatsia, which is majority-owned by the state. These were Georgi Rogachev, Plamen Vassilev, Georgi Nenkov, Ivanka Dilovska and Ilko Yotsev, who were on the managing board of the heating utility and were investigated for letting the company’s former managing director Valentin Dimitrov spend 438 000 leva of company money for personal purposes.

Dimitrov, however, was not so lucky. On June 25, the Sofia City Court found Dimitrov guilty of embezzling six million leva from the firm and sentenced him to 14 years imprisonment and confiscation of all his assets. It was the second sentence against the former Toplofikatsiya executive, who was earlier found guilty of currency fraud.