Sofia, August 26 (BTA) - The assets of Tsvetan Vassilev, majority owner of the ailing Corporate Commercial Bank (Corpbank), were frozen by the Sofia City Court on August 22, the prosecuting magistracy said on Tuesday. Asset freezes were also imposed on other members of the Corpbank management and on Tsvetan Gounev, Deputy Governor of the Bulgarian National Bank (the country's central bank).
Corpbank has been inoperable since June 21 due to a lack of liquid assets and has been placed under special supervision by the central bank to allow a thorough audit and possible restructuring. The owner Vassilev and senior executives of the bank have been charged with gross official embezzlement.
The prosecuting magistracy recalled that Vassilev was put on an international wanted persons list on July 28 with the assistance of the EU judicial cooperation agency Eurojust. At that time, he was believed to be staying in Austria. But after relevant data was fed into the Schengen information system and the Interpol system, the law enforcers received a report from Austria saying that Vassilev was unknown to the Austrian authorities.
A few days later, the case against the Corpbank executives was entered into the Eurojust case management system and was officially reported during an Eurojust plenary meeting.
On August 13, Ivan Geshev, supervising prosecutor in the pretrial proceedings, asked the Interior Ministry in Sofia to take steps to have Vassilev arrested and extradited from any Interpol member country to Bulgaria.
On August 25, Vassilev said in a statement published in his personal blog that he is working, jointly with his partners of Oman's State General Reserve Fund and other investors, on a model for restructuring Corpbank.
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