Morality not a criteria
One of the most scandalous decisions by the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC), which is meant to exercise control over senior members of the Bench, happened on November 14. By just two votes against, the SJC decided to reinstate Delyan Peevski as an investigator at the Sofia Investigative Service. The name Peevski became known around Bulgaria on May 5, when Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev fired him from the post of deputy minister for disaster management. Stanishev’s decision was a result of the so-called Ovcharov-Alexandov affair when Roumen Ovcharov, then economy minister, and Angel Alexandrov, then head of the National Investigative Service, accused each other of corruption. Both left their posts together with Peevski and Kornelia Ninova, one of Ovcharov’s deputies. Peevski (27) was accused by Hristo Lachev, head of state-owned tobacco giant Bulgartabac, of trying to unlawfully put pressure on him. After “leaving” the executive branch, Peevski and his mother, former head of Bulgarian National Lottery Irena Krusteva, headed for the media business and bought the majority shares in the company publishing national dailies Monitor and Telegraf. The November 14 SJC decision, however, has to do with Peevski’s professional biography prior to his ministerial stint. In 2005, aged 25, Peevski became one of the youngest investigators working for Alexandrov. After Stanishev fired him, Peevski applied for his old job as investigator. The SJC rejected this on the grounds that his behaviour in the executive branch was immoral and therefore he lacked the qualities to return to the judicial system. Peevski appealed in the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) against the decision, and won. The court said that moral considerations were not a criterion and the SJC had to reinstall Peevski. “We had no other choice but to follow the SAC’s ruling,” Tsoni Tsonev told reporters on November 5.

The Margins case
Much like the case against Valentin Dimitrov, the former head of Sofia’s heating utility Toplofikatsia, the case against the two brothers Krassimir Marinov and Nikolai Marinov, nicknamed the Big and the Small Margins, has become a case study of how slow and procedural Bulgaria’s judiciary can be. The two brothers were alleged by Bulgarian-language media to be among the most powerful and influential mobsters in the country. After numerous media reports about their activity in November 2005, the two brothers were arrested by 18 heavily-armed police who stormed their luxury office on Sofia’s James Bourchier Boulevard. The brothers were accused of plotting the murder of three people: retired general Lyuben Gotsev, financial expert Nikola Damyanov and Ivan Todorov, nicknamed The Doctor. Since then, the Margins’ case has failed to enter court, since their lawyers have used every opportunity to postpone and delay the hearings. Each and every month, TV reports show the Margins entering the courtroom, only to leave it after few minutes, after yet another postponement. Their defence counsel’s major argument continues to be the poor state of the brothers’ health.

On November 5, Krassimir Marinov appeared in court in a wheelchair, and supported by friends to prove that his condition was deteriorating. The court scheduled its next hearing for December 3. Meanwhile, two of the three people whose murders the brothers were alleged to have plotted are dead. In September last year, Todorov was shot dead in his Porsche Cayenne in broad daylight in Sofia’s central Lozenets neighbourhood. Damyanov, linked to the Varna-based industrial group TIM, died of a heart attack this October.

Chorata - the showcase
The death of Angel “Chorata” Dimitrov in the winter of 2005 scandalised Bulgaria, because a coroner’s report said that Dimitrov, allegedly involved in drug trafficking, was brutally tortured and beaten to death. The problem was that at the time Dimitrov was beaten, according to the report, he was under arrest in Blagoevgrad police department in a single cell. At first, Interior Minister Roumen Petkov backed the actions of the five police officers who had arrested Dimitrov. The arrest was part of police Operation Respect that was conceived by Petkov personally as his response to organised crime.

Police maintained the version that Dimitrov died of a heart attack. After the medical report was published showing that Dimitrov was murdered, Petkov changed his stand and order the arrest of the police involved.

On November 9, the Military Court in Sofia sentenced the five defendants to a total of 91 years imprisonment. The former head of the Blagoevgrad organised crime-fighting unit, who was in charge of Dimitrov’s arrest, Miroslav Pissov got 19 years. The other four defendants, Ivo Ivanov, Boris Mehandzhijski, Georgi Kalinkov and Yanko Grahovski, were sentenced to 18 years each. All of them said that they would appeal against their sentences.

Zero tolerance
While the courts were busy with these cases, Interior Minister Petkov showed a positive outlook about the fight against crime in Bulgaria.

At a November 13 forum on the theme of Bulgaria’s progress towards its recognition as a European state of law, Petkov promised to show corruption zero tolerance. He cited statistics that 50 of his employees had been fired on such charges in the past year. As for Dimitrov’s case, Petkov said that he had expressed his position by firing the five police officers at the time. “In the past one year we have managed to change the atmosphere in the ministry. We stopped the practice of key figures working for law enforcement blaming each other.”

In turn, Prosecutor-General Boris Velchev, who took part in the forum as well, said that Prosecutors were still working on the inquiry into the Ovcharov-Alexandrov affair, and asked for more patience. “I will not allow a rash haste in the work of the prosecution. It is more important for the prosecution to do its job well, rather than fast,” he said.

Fair trial was neither fast, nor easy. “The truth is that we follow severe, very formal rules, to guarantee the rights of everyone,” Velchev said. He presented a report on the implementation of a plan of action in the judicial system. The plan was based on a “profound analysis” of the European Commission report from June 2007 and its recommendations to Bulgarian authorities, Velchev said. The plan included, among others, constitutional amendments to establish indisputable independence of the judicial system, transparent and effective trials, a new law on the Judicial System and Civil Procedure Code, the continuation of judicial system reforms; investigation of corruption among high-level officials; measures in the fight against organised crime and money laundering and the confiscation of the assets of criminals.

*In economics and finance, a marginal cost is the change in total cost that arises when the quantity produced changes by one unit.