Bulgaria’s Constitutional Court has issued a ruling allowing the Dossier Commission – the body charged by law with identifying and disclosing the names of former communist-era secret agents – to make such disclosures solely on the basis of circumstantial evidence, Bulgarian-language media said on March 27 2012.
 
The Constitutional Court had overruled an earlier decision by another court that would not have allowed the practice of naming former State Security and Bulgarian People’s Army intelligence services people solely on the basis of their names appearing in registers.
 
The decision was reported by television station TV7 and has been interpreted as opening the way for disclosing whether there were links between State Security and the "credit millionaires" who emerged in the immediate aftermath of the formal end of Bulgaria’s decades-long communist regime.
 
Credit millionaires acquired large sums in instant wealth through illicit manipulation of the banking system by various means, including unsecured loans.
 
Interviewed by TV7, the former head of the Dossier Commission, said that the Constitutional Court’s decision came as surprise, but he welcomed it as in favour of the democratic process and as the result of the clear and precise political will of President Rossen Plevneliev.
 
"Let’s see if these so-called ‘capitalists" were State Security agents, let us investigate people like Valentin Zahariev," Andreev said. Zahariev is a business person who was at the centre of controversy over unpaid salaries at the Gorubso - Madan mines and mines in Kurdjali that he also held under concession.
 
He said that the law governing the disclosure of communist-era secret service records should be expanded.
 
Andreev recommended that the commission should be able to investigate business owners who do not pay salaries, taxes and social insurance. Bulgarian-language media said that Labour and Social Policy Minister Totyu Mladenov said that there currently at least 400 such businesses.