site.btaVazrazhdane Sends Treason Tipoff to Prosecution Service against GERB Leader

Vazrazhdane leader Kostadin Kostadinov said he would file a tipoff with the prosecution service against GERB leader Boyko Borissov on suspicion of treason, the Vazrazhdane party said here in a press release on Monday.

The leader of Vazrazhdane referred to an article in The Wall Street Journal according to which Borissov, a former Prime Minister sought to leverage Donald Trump Jr.’s visit to Eastern Europe in April to seek relief from Magnitsky Act sanctions on his allies in exchange for Bulgarian assets. 

Kostadinov recalled that the meetings between Trump and Borissov have been accompanied by “many deals that are disadvantageous for Bulgaria, such as the one for the F-16 aircraft blueprints”, the press release said.

In Kostadinov's words, The Wall Street Journal published an article which makes it clear that Boyko Borissov met with Donald Trump Jr. in April in Sofia, where he offered to sell him the Bulgarian part of TurkStream as well as the Lukoil [Neftohim] refinery in Burgas [subsidiary of PJSC Lukoil]. 

Interestingly, the refinery is foreign-owned, while the gas pipeline is state-owned, but in both cases Borissov is not the owner. "However, he shows a willingness to dispose of not only state property but also foreign property as if it were his own. In return, Borissov wants two things: the lifting of the Magnitsky sanctions against his associates (the exact names are not mentioned in the article, but obviously we are talking about [Movement for Rights and Freedoms leader Delyan] Peevski and probably [former Finance Minister Vladislav] Goranov) and a new meeting with President Trump." 

He said further that the meetings between Borissov and Trump "are very costly for the State". "I would like to remind you that for the first one in 2019, he paid 3 billion for the F-16 blueprints, just to get a 15-minute meeting in front of the fireplace in the White House. Now, he is obviously ready to raise the stakes and is about to sell off the country. I wonder what comes next? Why doesn’t Borissov offer Burgas for sale, along with the refinery, which he will obviously have to steal from its foreign owner first? Or maybe he could sell Varna too, just for fun, in a package deal? As for the source, it is obvious that the article is not accidental. Borissov, like his boss Peevski, does not enjoy the trust of the Trump administration. The Americans are sending a clear message to Borissov, and through him to Peevski, that their time in Bulgarian politics is up. The fact that no new American ambassador has been sent to Bulgaria for almost a year is  a further unprecedented proof of this," Kostadinov wrote in a post on social media.

What The Wall Street Journal Says

The Wall Street Journal article headlined He Drops Trump Jr.’s Name in Pursuit of Billion-Dollar Deals. It’s Getting Awkward, reads that "former Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, still Bulgaria’s most powerful man,” saw an opportunity in April when Trump Jr. was on his Eastern European tour, to “advertise the pipeline and other Bulgarian assets.” Borissov hoped, the article adds, to “secure a meeting with the U.S. president he met in 2019”. Among other things, Borissov was “seeking relief from U.S. Magnitsky Act sanctions for some of his close allies.”

“Borissov joined Trump Jr. at a lunch with executives from the cryptocurrency company Nexo, which had invited the president’s son to speak. There, he told Trump Jr. how much he respected his father and brought up his desire for a U.S. investment in the pipeline, taking out a paper map, but he was speaking through a translator at a crowded table, the people said. Trump Jr. was bewildered by talk of the pipeline and made clear he had no interest in it, a person close to him said,” the article goes.