site.btaAppellate Court Closes 12-Year-Old High-Profile SAPARD Fraud Case as Prescriptive Period Expires

Sofia, March 1 (BTA) - The Appellate Specialized Criminal Court
has closed a 12-year-old high-profile case for fraud involving
the EU-funded SAPARD programme as the prescriptive period
expired. The court told BTA that it thus discontinued the
criminal proceedings against Mario Nikolov, who was charged with
 leading a crime group for draining SAPARD, the EU special
accession programme for agriculture and rural development. 

For the same reason, on February 19 the court also closed a case
 against Ana Sharkova, who was Nikolov's co-defendant.

The SAPARD case

The case started when ten Bulgarians were charged in 2006 with
defrauding the EU SAPARD Programme of 7.5 million euro. The
arrests followed an alert from OLAF, the European Anti-Fraud
Office, about a carousel scheme in Bulgaria and Germany using
old meat processing machines. The prosecutors said the suspected
 fraudsters retrofitted the machines and claimed grant financing
 from SAPARD for them.

In Bulgaria, the case was split into two: one for the 7.5
million euro fraud against businessman Mario Nikolov, his wife
Mariana Nikolova and seven co-defendants, and the other for
money laundering against Nikolov, his wife, Lyudmil Stoykov,
known as a sponsor of former President Georgi Purvanov, and four
 other co-defendants.

In the first case, the court acquitted two of the defendants,
sentenced Mario Nikolov to 12 years in prison for the 7.5
million euro SAPARD fraud, four co-defendants to 10 years in
prison and one to three years conditionally. The first-instance
sentences were delivered in 2010. On September 21, 2012, the
Sofia Appellate Court acquitted all who had been sentenced after
 finding the decision of the first-instance court ill-grounded.
In January 2013, then acting prosecutor general Boyko Naydenov
moved for reopening the case on the grounds of a violation of
the Penal Code and in March 2014 it was reopened.

Meanwhile the prescriptive period for the presumed offence of
six defendants expired and Nikolov and Sharkova were acquitted
again. In mid-2020, the Supreme Court of Cassation returned the
case to the Appellate Specialized Criminal Court for
inconsistencies in the acquittal - which brought the matter to
its finale in 2021.

The money laundering case ended with acquittal for all
defendants.

Two Germans were involved in the scheme and both were sentenced
in 2008 but the Bulgarian court disregarded the materials on the
 case sent by the German court about the operation of the
carousel scheme.

According to the motives to a court decision at one of the many
stages of the case, it was doomed to fail due to its splitting
in two.  RI/LN/DD .