Graft row: Bulgaria leader confronts prosecutors

Bloomberg

Bulgaria’s new prime minister criticized the nation’s prosecutors for dragging their feet on tackling graft, advancing a pledge to fight the problem in the European Union’s most corrupt member state.
Premier Kiril Petkov, who won November elections promising “zero tolerance for corruption,” provided a list of 19 people he said “are potentially involved in wrongful activities” along with investigative media reports outlining
alleged misdeeds.
Petkov was summoned as a witness on Wednesday after he accused Chief Prosecutor Ivan Geshev for not doing enough to look into high-profile crimes. They include financial and other infractions over the past decade that media have often covered with significant detail but that remain unsolved.
“Neither Bulgarian society nor the Bulgarian government is happy with the results that the prosecutor’s office has achieved,” Petkov told reporters after the meeting.
Corruption, the lack of rule of law, and the intersection of organized crime with politics have for years plagued Bulgaria, hindering investment and economic growth and fueling a population exodus that has made the Balkan state one of the world’s fastest-shrinking countries.
Over the past 20 years, dozens of high-ranking political officials and businessmen have been investigated and charged for a wide array of crimes, including scores of contract killings, but none has gone to jail. The European Commission put Bulgaria under a special monitoring mechanism when it joined the bloc in 2007, and a lack of progress has kept Bulgaria out of the passport-free Schengen zone.
Petkov’s election victory followed mass protests that started in 2020 in which Bulgarians called for Geshev and then-Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, who ran the country for more than a decade, to resign over alleged links with
organised crime.