Eight brand new transport vehicles of baking firm Vip Simers Group were set on fire in the night of May 3 2008, Bulgarian National Television (BNT) said. Two men wearing masks broke into the premisses of the company in the small town of Lom on the Danube.

They attacked the guard, hit him several times and tied him up. After that, one of the attackers started breaking the front windows of the brand new Mercedes vans, while the other was setting them on fire using inflammable liquid, the guard told BNT. The fire caused damages estimated at hundreds of thousands of leva.

It all took less than 30 minutes. The vehicles are completely destroyed. A police investigation was lunched.

Vip Simers Group is owned by Plovdiv businessmen Hristo Kostov and Bono Popov. The company has been fined two times by the Commission for Competition Protection for misleading advertising.

Kostov was quoted by Bulgarian-language Monitor daily that the company was in debt to nobody and had received no threats whatsoever. Bonov told Monitor that the reason for the attack was the competition coming from the “grey economy sector”. The company went into the baking business quite recently and started selling bread prices at lower than those of other producers.

Kostov said that the new technology the company was using had allowed them to sell a kilo of bread at a price of 90 stotinki while other producers were selling it at 1.20 leva a kilo.

This was not the first attack on the company, Kostov said. Some days ago a vehicle used by one of the company's drivers was also set on fire, he said.

“We are afraid. There is no guarantee that the attackers will limit themselves to what they did that night,” Plamen Vangleov, manager of the  plant told Bulgarian BGNES news agency. The plant will soon reopen for business, he added.