The Municipal Court of Dimitrovgrad has fined Boryana Georgieva, the woman who organised the tragic trip to Lake Ohrid in which 15 Bulgarian tourists lost their lives, a total of 4500 leva, Bulgarian news agency BTA reported on July 22 2010.

Moreover, Georgieva was banned from conducting any tour-operating business for the period of two years, BTA said.

Georgieva had organised the trans-border tourist trip without the appropriate licence and documentation, the court found.

She told the court that she was not a tour operator, had not been employed in that capacity, and that she had not issued any documents.

She claimed that the decision to go to Ohrid was made "informally" by herself and some of her friends who "expressed a desire to visit Ohrid". The money for the transport was given to her simply because she "organised the transport to Ohrid," BTA reported her as saying.

Fifteen Bulgarian tourists died after a passenger boat full of 55 tourists sunk in the lake on September 5 2009.

The tragic incident with the Iinden boat, built in Germany in 1924, happened at 10.20am local time just 100 metres from the shore on the east side of the lake, one of deepest in Europe, which lies on the border between Macedonia and Albania. It sank seven metres into the lake.

Evidence of the lack of state control over companies carrying out such trips was evident in the chaotic and often contradictory statements made by ministers about who actually organised the trip to Ohrid. While Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov was saying one name, Economy, Energy and Tourism Minister Traicho Traikov was saying another.

In the end, the list was brought down to three companies involved in organising the trip, all of which lacked the actual licence to do so because they were not registered as tour operators but as transport companies.

From this confusion, it appeared that anybody can rent a bus in Bulgaria, book a hotel in Ohrid and start selling tourism packages to people without any control from the state.

The law stipulates that travellers should have medical insurance but, as it turned out, no one controlled this either. The only way this could happen is if travellers complain to the Consumer Protection Committee or if the state decides to check companies after getting a tip-off.