site.btaBulgarian EPPO Office Set High Standard but Is Yet to Be Made Fully Operational, European Chief Prosecutor Kovesi Says

From an administrative perspective, the Bulgarian office of the European Public Prosecutors Office (EPPO) is an example for the other EPPO offices to follow, European Chief Prosecutor Laura Kovesi said here Thursday. She added though that the Sofia office is yet to be made fully operational. 

She was speaking at a news conference she held jointly with Bulgarian Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov and Deputy Prime Minister Mariya Gabriel. She added that building the EPPO office in Bulgaria was “a huge effort of the national authorities”.

She said she had constructive and efficient meetings in Sofia where three issues dominated her agenda. 

The first topic was having to finalize the effort to have a fully operational EPPO office in Bulgaria. "A lot of important steps have been made in the last period of time. As you may know, we did not have the full number of European delegated prosecutors appointed. We have received a proposal to appoint seven new prosecutors, and we also discussed other things that have to be finalized in order to have a fully operational office in Bulgaria. Comparing the Bulgaria EPPO office with the other offices, we established a very high standard and I used to use Bulgaria as a good example because it was a huge effort of the national authorities to make this office in a proper way, to be independent, to have its own staff and dedicated police officers to work on our cases," said she. 

The second topic was the competence of the EPPO for combatting organized criminal groups and fighting financial fraud, and how Bulgaria has implemented the directive which defines the crimes falling within the EPPO powers. Kovesi said that the EPPO has a problem in Bulgaria because it cannot exercise fully its competence here when goods are undervalued. 

The third issue was extending the EPPO powers to allow it to look into breaches of the sanctions against Russia. Kovesi said that the EPPO currently has very limited competence in this department and two steps need to be made to change that: first, to make the circumvention of sanctions a crime in the national legislation and, second, to extend the EPPO competence for this time of crimes.

She congratulated the Bulgarian authorities for choosing to join a Franco-German initiative to extend the EPPO powers to investigate circumvention of the Russia sanctions.

Asked if her office has any information about senior politicians, business people or oligarchs involved with big corruption, she said the EPPO has hundreds of cases under investigation, and among these are some very serious cases concerning important infrastructure.