In a closed session on Thursday, the National Assembly heard outgoing Interior Minister Kalin Stoyanov on Martin Bozhanov, aka The Notary, who was killed in late January.
"Today's hearing of the outgoing interior minister reaffirmed our opinion that he cannot continue to carry out this activity and be part of a caretaker government that would organize fair elections," Hristo Ivanov of Continue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria (CC-DB) told journalists.
"We did not get an answer on whether Martin Bozhanov was an Interior Ministry collaborator," he added.
According to Ivanov, the documents in Parliament's secret registry are refusals to provide information to the ad hoc committee probing the facts and circumstances related to the activities of the group around Bozhanov. "Neither documentarily nor verbally have we received an answer to the simple question of whether The Notary was a collaborator of the Interior Ministry, and if he was, was that an element of abuse of that status, because that is the big question," Hristo Ivanov said.
"We all understood from the way he [Stoyanov] defended this information that this person [Bozhanov] was a collaborator, because if he wasn't, I guess it would have been easier to say he wasn't," Ivanov added.
"When there has been abuse of the Interior Ministry as part of a power-trading scheme, which we don't know how high it has gone, and the National Assembly is denied information about it, that is a huge problem and such a person simply cannot bear the responsibility of being interior minister," the MP said.
According to him, CC-DB were only partners with MRF in the necessary changes to the Constitution. "The fact that Peevski, through GERB, was given the opportunity to try to interfere in the process of governing the state was a problem that we have been identifying all along. We were trying in every way to counteract it," Ivanov added and clarified that when they came to the issue of filling the regulators and the judiciary the scandal broke out and the rift occurred. "We refused to share this responsibility with him in the way he imagined," the lawmaker said.
"In a closed session, a decision of the National Assembly to hear the minister on a specific issue, he came and said - I will not tell you," said CC-DB co-floor leader Atanas Atanasov.
He pointed out that Kalin Stoyanov had said that the Interior Ministry's headquarters during the elections was to be headed by the Secretary General. Atanasov wondered whether it’s a coincidence that the Secretary General was removed in view of the forthcoming snap elections.
Martin Bozhanov was shot dead in a gated complex in a Sofia suburb on the evening of January 31. According to media reports, he was a large-scale fixer of people's problems with the judiciary. He has been implicated in building a network of connections with prosecutors and judges whom he allegedly bribed, threatened, blackmailed or otherwise pressured to treat his "clients" favourably. In early February, Parliament set up an ad hoc committee to probe the facts and circumstances surrounding the activity of Bozhanov and his group.
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