A Christmas mystery worth $25 million. Will Bulgaria pay them to a British old man?

The case of the Ministry of Environment and Water against TPP “Brickel” for 25 mln. Lv. The budget was decided on December 23 by the Supreme Administrative Court, but has not yet been published on the court’s website. The new Environment Minister Borislav Sandov commented for the BRRD that he does not know what the decision is, but is a bad indicator that it is coming out on Christmas Eve.

The case was filed by TPP Brickel, which claims that the MOEW has incorrectly cut its greenhouse gas quotas. At first instance, Brickel won by a decision of the Sofia City Administrative Court, quoted by Mediapool.

Rapporteur on the case in the Supreme Administrative Court is Judge Alexander Mitrev, who is seconded by Adm. court – Plovdiv.

TPP “Brickel” and several other district heating companies around the country are contacted by the energy boss Hristo Kovachki, who, however, does not appear anywhere with his name in the registers.

Since 2018, companies have had to declare their beneficial owners because of the European directive on the disclosure of ownership in the company registers of the Member States. It is particularly brazen that all district heating companies associated with Kovachki declare as beneficial owners “straw persons” and thus mock the Measures Against Money Laundering Act.

The actual owner of Brickell in the Bulgarian Trade Register is officially declared 83-year-old British David Fordham. He lives somewhere in the industrial area of Wakefield, West Yorkshire. The company through which he owns Brickell is called Bakkar Limited. It has 1 pound of capital and is kept dormant according to the British Trade Register.

A curious coincidence is that yesterday, December 23, exactly on the day when the decision of the Supreme Administrative Court came out, the owner of Bakkar Limited and Brickel was replaced. Now it’s a certain Roy Kennedy, born in 1951, showed a check in the British Trade Register. In order to reflect this change, a new declaration of ultimate owner must be submitted to the Bulgarian Commercial Register.

At the same address as Grandpa Fordham lives the owner of Toplofikatsia “Pleven” Elizabeth Clair Woolham. It owns the company Cataland Ltd., also with 1 pound of capital and 1 pound of account balance. The modest British company owns 100% of the shares of the Pleven district heating company.

The match in addresses is not easy to find in the Commercial Register, where there is no search by beneficial owner. For the purposes of journalistic investigations, BRRD has created a convenient search tool in the open data of the Commercial Register. It makes it easy to detect the declared beneficial owners. It is enough to enter the name of the company or person and the text ActualOwners in the search engine. It can also be searched by address.

The owner of DHC “Burgas” is 81-year-old Stuart Ralph Poppleton. He owns the Burgas district heating company through the company Bovard Ltd. He listed as an address a house in a residential area decorated with a scaled replica of an Easter Island statue.

So far, law enforcement has done nothing against this blatantly false data. The possible explanation for this passivity of the prosecution is that the woman next to Prosecutor General Ivan Geshev Detelina Hancheva is a legal adviser of Kovachki’s construction company – OZK “Insurance”.

If the case is lost by the Ministry of Environment and Water, the Ministry will appeal to a higher instance, Borislav Sandov was adamant.

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This post is also available in: Български (Bulgarian)