Just five years ago, most Bulgarians had not heard the name Hristo Kovachki, the businessman now under investigation for alleged tax avoidance adding up to millions.
European Integration Minister Gergana Grancharova said that he would serve as an example for the European Commission of how Bulgaria was coping with organised crime.

Kovachki started appearing in the Bulgarian media in the first half of this decade mainly as someone in the business of food retail and exports. At the time, he was more famous for having wed a pop-folk singer rather than for his business endeavours.

As the years passed, however, his business moves started attracting the attention of the media, and this October Kovachki found himself listed among the top 100 richest people in South Eastern Europe. Poland's Wprost magazine put him at 98th position with a business empire estimated at $700 million.

And what a business empire it is. Born in 1962 in the small town of Samokov, Kovachki graduated from the Saint Petersburg State University (formerly Leningrad University). Although he has not spoken openly about his first business endeavours, saying only that he started in the food retail trade, reports in the Bulgarian media have linked him to exports of food products to the former USSR at the beginning of the 1990s. Trading with the vast Russian market must have proven very profitable for Kovachki, since in the late 1990s he aimed at the Bulgarian energy sector, to emerge eight years later as "Bulgaria's energy tycoon" as he is often referred to in the media.

According to recent interviews he gave, Kovachki is on the boards of between 40 and 50 companies, ranging from coal mines, thermal power plants, heating utilities, a bank and an insurance company and business in Serbia. The jewel in his crown is the Atomenergoremont company, which provides maintenance to Bulgaria's only nuclear power plant at Kozloduy on the Danube River.

Kovachki's answer to the question of how he had managed to accumulate all this wealth has always been: bank loans and lots of hard work by having people he could count on.

People have been his asset no doubt. Kovachki is one of the businessmen in Bulgaria who really values young people and their desire for personal development. His moves usually involve placing young and inexperienced but highly motivated and loyal people in charge of companies in which he has stakes. One example is a 23-year-old woman who in 2005 headed one of Kovachki's companies that own millions of leva in assets accumulated in privatisation deals.

Another interesting aspect of Kovachki's development is that up until few months ago he kept a low public profile. His March appearance on the Bulgarian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire TV show as part of a charity initiative was taken as a real surprise by the media.

The second media appearance was not planned that well.

It happened after, in April, Atomenergoremont's executive director Boris Georgiev was assassinated in front of his home in Sofia. Since then Kovacki's public image started shaping up as one of Bulgaria's oligarchs. His interest in politics added to reasons for the media to portray him as such.

In recent years he has openly supported the newly formed Lider party which won seats in the 2007 municipal elections. His appetites grew stronger with the upcoming general elections for Parliament next year and just recently he welcomed the creation of the political alliance Napred ("forward" in Bulgarian) that Lider formed with several others small parties, some already represented in Parliament.

Then came the interview he gave to 24 Chassa daily, in which he asked, almost out of nowhere, for authorities to check his business if they had any doubts. The check happened the next very day, leading to Kovachki being accused of avoiding millions in taxes, and then released on 300 000 leva bail, a record high for the country.

Kovachki promised police full co-operation and showed no signs of concern, apart from mocking the Government's attempts to portray him as the biggest fish they had yet caught and to try to liken Kovachki to Al Capone, the Chicago mobster of the 1930s who went to federal prison for tax evasion.