BGN 164 million liabilities to the NRA of companies related to the Pandora Papers

Documents from the global journalistic investigation The Pandora Papers reveal connections of offshore owners with 68 companies in Bulgaria, which have accumulated a total of BGN 164 million in liabilities to the NRA. С времето някои от задълженията са отписани и актуалния дълг на тези фирми към фиска е спаднал на 148 милиона лв. Списъкът на фирмите може да бъде видян тук.

The BRRD search engine detected 8 companies among the 3 billion debts written off in October 2020 liabilities of the 8 companies. This continues to happen during the mandate of the caretaker government. In June 2021 and most recently in September 2021, the Rumen Spetsov, the NRA removes from the lists of debtors two more companies related to persons with offshore companies from the Pandora Papers, one with BGN 6 million in debts and the other with more than BGN 0.5 million in debts.

Some of the owners of offshore companies were owners or managers of the debtor companies and transferred them to the so-called. “straw faces”, most often propertyless and socially disadvantaged, from whom the state fails to collect debts and they are written off by prescription. Among the owners of offshore companies there are also the so-called. professional “debt cleaners”, for whom journalistic investigations have been made more than once over the years. Others were on the boards of directors or procurators of some of the debtors. Today, some of the companies are in the process of liquidation or have already been deleted, others are without property and the collection of their debts will be almost impossible, but there are also 11 companies with property on which it has been imposed Collateral (second list). They stand out in the detailed list here with what is marked in the second column ‘collateral’.

BIRD.BG is a partner of ICIJ in the investigation and continues to investigate the information about nearly 200 persons with Bulgarian citizenship or living in Bulgaria who appear in the Pandora Papers and there is a possibility that the information on the connections of companies debtor to the NRA will be supplemented. The Bulgarian politicians in the Pandora Papers revealed so far are Delyan Peevski, Nikolay Mladenov, Nikolay Barekov, and Arben Khavalyov. In addition to them, the files include large financiers, lawyers, persons associated with multimillion-dollar fraudulent schemes, but also entrepreneurs with regular business, without visible political protection, who have registered offshore companies and declared them to the Bulgarian authorities. The investigation of the BIRD.BG also revealed the secret offshore companies of the owners of First Investment Bank
Tseko Minev and Ivaylo Mutafchiev
, who over the years have received loans worth over a billion levs from their own bank. Their offshore companies have also been used in schemes for racketeering the business with final beneficiary Delyan Peevski. After the outbreak of the Pandora Files scandal, several Bulgarian institutions, including the NRA, promised to investigate the persons with offshore companies, but the only publicly known action so far is the habituation of Delyan Peevski to the State Agency for National Security. It is noteworthy that the Bulgarian Magnitsky list, prepared by the Ministry of Finance, has not yet been expanded with Peevski’s new offshore companies, which jumped out of Pandora. There is also no lawyer Alexander Angelov, to whom Peevski has transferred two offshore companies. This publication gives publicity to the companies debtors of the NRA and is not intended to disclose the connections and announce the names of individuals , but does BIRD.BG have this information. The revelations will continue and some of them will be included in future publications.

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