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Polymeri AD Owners
Investigated by
Specialized Prosecution Office


Sofia, October 26 (BTA) - Investigating magistrates of the Specialized Prosecution Office (SPO) are searching Polymeri AD in Devnya (Northeastern Bulgaria) and are carrying out searches and seizures and are questioning witnesses in Sofia and elsewhere in the country, the SPO said in a press release on Friday.

An investigation has been instituted in connection with gross tax evasion, gross embezzlement, using a document making a false statement or a non-authentic or falsified document to receive another's movable or immovable property without legal justification with the intention to misappropriate it, effecting financial operations or transactions in property, or concealing the origin, location, movement or the actual rights to any such property, knowing or supposing that this property was acquired by means of a criminal offence or another socially dangerous act, and conspiring to commit criminal offences abroad.

BTA learnt from knowledgeable sources that the owners of Polymeri, Nikolai Banev and his wife Evgenia Baneva, have been detained in France.

After visiting Polymeri in August 2017, Prime Minister Boyko Borissov said he had approached Prosecutor General Sotir Tstatsarov for holding to account the people responsible for "this highway robbery", as he referred to the plant's privatization. In response, Banev accused Borissov of having been instrumental in ruining the plant and in "bringing to an end the production of inorganic chemicals in Bulgaria".

Polymeri was privatized in 1998. Banev purchased a 24 per cent stake for 12.5 million US dollars, and in the autumn of 2011 the Banevs' Polymeri Invest company acquired majority interest in the company. It produced dichloroethane, sodium hydroxide and polyvinyl chloride until 2000, when it ceased operations and went bankrupt. A huge quantities of trichloroethane are stored in unreliable tanks within the compound of the plant. The Government has allocated nearly 15 million leva for the safe disposal of the hazardous chemical in France. LI/LG

/СН/