site.btaCorruption Allegations against Bulgaria's European Prosecutor Probed

The Sofia City Prosecution Office (SCPO) said Wednesday that, acting on its own initiative, it has launched an investigation "in connection with a video circulated on the internet allegedly showing the former director of the Sofia Investigation Service P.P. talking to an active magistrate".

The statement comes after an anonymous video was leaked to the media on Monday specifying that it showed Bulgaria's European Prosecutor Teodora Georgieva discussing a corruption scheme benefiting her with notorious judiciary fixer Petyo "Evroto" Petrov. In the footage Petrov is talking to a woman whose face is not visible. The video came with an attached letter allegedly signed by Petrov, implicating Georgieva in corrupt practices. The prosecution service's statement does not mention Georgieva by name and only uses Petrov's initials, but the facts it cites exactly match the information accompanying the video leak.

The email from which the leak was sent, anticoruprbg, resembles the email address of the Anti-Corruption Fund (ACF), whose investigation that exposed Petrov's doings as a fixer in the judiciary. ACF released a statement denying that they were aware of the video, that they had circulated it, and that this was their email. "The surfacing of this video only proves ACF's belief that there exist Petyo Evroto Papers with secret audio and video recordings which can be used for extortion, smear campaigns or pressure on Bulgarian magistrates or senior office-holders," the investigative journalism organization commented. 

A former head of the Sofia investigative service, Petrov is being tried for extortion and for using forged documents to steal hundreds of thousands in cash and gold bars from a businessman. He went missing in 2023 on the day it transpired that law-enforcers were after him, and has been unaccounted for ever since. 

The SCPO said that the investigation has been assigned to the Commission for Anti-Corruption, which has been instructed to identify individuals who may be linked to the events shown in the video and to obtain statements from them.

"An expert analysis will be assigned in order to establish whether the persons talking in the video are indeed the persons they are alleged to be," the SCPO said.