Financial penalties and other confiscation orders issued by any European Union court will be directly applicable in Bulgaria, in terms of a draft bill proposed by the Justice Ministry.

The draft bill, to be called the law on mutual recognition and application of financial penalties and confiscation orders, has been drafted in the light of Bulgaria’s obligation as an EU member to implement two European Council framework decisions from 2005 and 2006.  

The draft law provides that financial penalties and confiscation orders issued by an EU court will be applicable in Bulgaria and vice versa. In other words, Bulgarian courts will directly apply financial confiscation rulings issued by EU courts.

Bulgaria is supposed to benefit from the act, if only for the fact that there are a number of Bulgarians with properties abroad that are being investigated by the country’s Asset Forfeiture Committee (AFC). 

The most recent example is the case against Angelina Dimitrova, wife of Konstantin Dimitrov. Described as having been one of the major crime bosses of Bulgaria, Dimitrov was shot dead in Amsterdam in 2003, leaving his wife to deal with his properties and with the AFC. After years of investigations and court proceedings, the AFC finally scored a breakthrough in December 2008 when the Sofia City Court issued a distraint on Dimitrova’s properties. These included an apartment in London’s Kensington, a luxury Mercedes CLK 230 and all of her bank accounts. 

Overall, the effect of the law should be felt by about 100 Bulgarians, which is the average number of Bulgarians sentenced in EU countries each year. This estimate was presented by prosecutor Kamen Mihov, head of the international legal co-operation department at the Supreme  Prosecutor’s Office of Cassation, in October this year.  

According to Mihov, Bulgarian criminals were high in the hierarchy of Western Europe criminal groups mainly involved in drug trafficking and money laundering. 

Besides just taking legal action against criminals, Mihov said, authorities’ next priority would be confiscation of perpetrators’ assets. This was why prosecutors were working with the AFC on gathering data on the number of Bulgarians sentenced abroad. The lack of such information, he said, was one of the reasons why people sentenced by EU courts had managed to come back to Bulgaria and resume their criminal activity unnoticed – activity which involved money laundering schemes. 

The text published on Justice Ministry’s websites has a clause on traffic fines which are included in the category of financial sanctions that are subject to the law. The idea of the law is to prevent people who have committed traffic offences on EU roads avoiding being fined by simply living in Bulgaria. The same rule should apply to those EU nationals who drive in Bulgaria but whose residential address is somewhere else in the EU.

Currently, Bulgarian police have few ways of making foreign traffic offenders pay their fines, especially those who are in transit through the country. Traffic Police can issue a fine which offenders usually contest in court. By the time the court rules on the case, offenders have long since left the country and no fine is paid. As for Bulgarian drivers being fined abroad, the draft bill says that any fine of more than 70 euro imposed by a EU court can be collected in Bulgaria. If the sum of the confiscated asset is less than 10 000 euro, it would go to Bulgaria’s budget. Anything above 10 000 euro will be split in half between Bulgaria and the respective country whose court has issued the ruling, the draft bill says.