For two weeks the public in Bulgaria have been baffled by a running scandal that started with a meeting between Prosecutor General Sotir Tsatsarov and businessman from the gas sector Sasho Donchev that took place at the office of another businessman, Georgi Gergov, who happens to be a member of the leadership of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP).

Donchev says that Tsatsarov made threats and asked him inadmissible questions about the newspaper he owns and publishes Sega; the prosecutor general denies it. President Rumen Radev and caretaker Prime Minister Ognyan Gerdzhikov have declined comment because of all of the ambiguity surrounding the incident. Yet, the opinion seems to be prevalent that a prosecutor general should not be discussing anything with any businessman outside his own office, not to mention the mediation of another businessman – in fact that was the reason why the Bulgarian Socialist Party decided to distance itself from Georgi Gergov. As BSP leader Kornelia Ninova put it, an entire party cannot be held accountable for the individual actions of one of its members, and under strong pressure, Gergov resigned from the BSP executive bureau. This, in turn, sent shockwaves across the party itself and its structures in Plovdiv turned against the central leadership.

GERB, the party that won the parliamentary elections, saw the incident as a risk and its leader Boyko Borissov stated the prosecutor general must have “fallen into the trap of the red oligarchs.” GERB too distances itself from Georgi Gergov and sent out instructions for the GERB-dominated municipalities of Plovdiv and Varna to get rid of their shares in the Plovdiv fair, the majority owner of which is precisely the businessman-cum-socialist Georgi Gergov. This in turn, caused havoc in the GERB party ranks, because the state-owned 49 percent share of the fair was actually transferred to the municipalities in Plovdiv and Varna by GERB itself less than one year ago.

The scandal evoked a fierce discussion with brutal and insulting personal attacks at the Supreme Judicial Council, which ultimately ruled in favour of the prosecutor general and refused to investigate him over his meeting with the businessmen Donchev and Gergov, saying it was a personal matter and raised no concerns whatsoever. The prosecutor general refused to be questioned by the magistrates as to why he had met with Donchev at all, as the scandal was allegedly fomented following someone else’s scenario which he was not a part of.

Latest developments show that instead of being unraveled, the scandal is getting more and more tangled. Thus, all insinuations that have surfaced as the scandal has progressed will probably remain within the realm of speculation rather than being investigated by any official institution and it will be up to the public to decide whether it is true that it was caused by the oligarchy, or whether there is nothing untoward going on and the two leading parties in the country plus the senior magistrates have been making a fuss over nothing.

English version: Milena Daynova