Octopus

Any warming there may have been turned chilly on February 9, when Petrov was arrested at his home as part of a police operation, dubbed Octopus, aimed against an organised crime group.

This group according to Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov, had been involved in racketeering, extortion, prostitution, gambling, trafficking of people, money laundering, tax evasion, influence peddling and economic offences, all in the past 10 years, or since 2000 when Bulgaria’s prime minister was Ivan Kostov, current leader of the right-wing Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria, one of the parties supporting Borissov’s Cabinet in Parliament. Naturally, given Petrov’s reputation, he attracted all the attention as the leader of the group, and was even given a nickname "The tractor".

Police footage of the arrest showed that Petrov was not the least surprised to see the armed police arriving at his home and that he duly lay down on the floor with his hands cuffed behind his back.

Conversation piece
Naturally Petrov’s arrest raised the question of who had appointed him as a secret agent, and when and what exactly he had been doing since, given his arrest for taking part in an organised crime group. Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov was the first to offer answers to these questions. In a February 14 interview with 24 Chassa daily, Tsvetanov said that Petrov had been appointed a secret agent at the request of then-prosecutor-general Nikola Filchev in 2000. At the time, Petrov joined the National Security Service (NSS), which was later incorporated into SANS.

This was where the political rumblings started, because in 2000 the prime minister was Kostov, and the NSS was headed by Atanas Atanasov, which meant that both had to have had some say in Petrov’s appointment. On February 15, Atanasov called for Filchev to be detained and questioned about the appointment of Petrov. Surprisingly, Atanasov confirmed that Petrov had been appointed to the NSS but that he, Atanasov, had no say in this appointment. The implication was that Filchev had been so powerful that he could appoint people as NSS agents without clearing it with the NSS head, which in this case had been Atanasov.

Filchev fired back in the media, rejecting the statements of Tsvetanov and Atanasov, saying that the only person who could have appointed Petrov was the interior minister at the time, at Atanasov’s request.

"This could be easily checked in NSS archives which are currently with SANS," Filchev said. All three failed to say what precisely it was that Petrov had been doing since 2000, and how he had managed to survive under three different governments. Others pointed fingers at Stanishev, asking why he had appointed Petrov to SANS in 2008. Stanishev, like Saxe-Coburg, has offered no answer to such questions.

All this is expected to be dealt with in the court case which is yet to be launched against Petrov, with analysts already expressing hopes that Borissov’s Cabinet will have the courage to go all the way in unveiling everything about Petrov’s past, given his image as a man who knows everybody and everything in Bulgaria.