site.btaCorpbank Majority Owner Tsvetan Vassilev Charged with Gross Embezzlement

Sofia, August 12 (BTA) - The majority owner and chairman of the Supervisory Board of the troubled Corporate Commercial Bank (Corpbank), Tsvetan Vassilev, has been charged with gross official embezzlement, the prosecution office said here Tuesday.  Vassilev is out of the country and his place of residence is not known.

It transpires from the announcement of the prosecution magistracy that the banker was charged on July 28 and an European warrant was immediately issued for his arrest. He has been put on the wanted persons list of Interpol and the Schengen information system.

The initial charge was that in the period between December 2011 and June 19, 2014, he coerced the Corpbank chief cashier, Margarita Petrova and the bank's executive director Orlin Roussev to withdraw 206 million leva.

Corpbank suspended all operations on June 21 due to lack of liquid assets and was placed under special supervision by the central bank to allow a thorough audit and possible restructuring.

Based on the evidence in the case and on the Corpbank audits by three companies authorized by the central bank, the investigators have formulated the tasks for a financial and accounting expert examination. A decision has been made to hire
an international organization with solid experience in the area, to do the expert examination, the prosecution office said.
   
It has been established that Corpbank officials tried to conceal documents from the investigators and the auditors. Parts of credit files and accounting documents of various companies were stashed in boxes labelled with "Remove in event of check", "Keep away from auditors" and others, and hidden in a sideroom.

The investigators also found 14 bags with shredded documents. It has been established that these were shredded on June 21, the day the bank was put under special supervision, on oral instructions from one of the executive directors. Original
Corpbank documents were also found during a search in another building in Sofia.

The central bank has been asked to make available to the investigation authorities all documents concerning the supervision of Corpbank.

On July 25, charges were pressed against Corpbank executive directors Ilian Zafirov, Georgi Hristov, Orlin Rousseb and Alexander Pantaleev for various degrees of complicity in intentional mismanagement.