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ДЕЛО "АРХАНГЕЛЬСКОГО" ВО ФРАНЦИИ И В БОЛГАРИИ

Властители в Кремле не терпят инакомыслие и становятся особо нервными, когда от него "отклоняются" люди с финансовыми ресурсами. Расправа с неудобными "олигархами" проводится с помощью государственной машины прокуратуры (в России она все ещё военизированная структура и прокуроры носят форму) и близких к власти банков. Так, например, Михаил Ходорковский отбывает многолетний приговор в лагере, а недавно Александр Лебедев получил обвинение в хулиганстве, за что может сесть в тюрьму на 5 лет. Лебедев известен своими критическими высказываниями в отношение власти кремлевского самодержца и имел неблагоразумие финансировать одну из немногих оппозиционных СМИ - "Новую газету". Однако симпатии к оппозиции не являются единственным для власти в Кремле критерием начать преследование богатых россиян. Мотивация может быть чисто житейской, или проще говоря – отнять накопленное. Таким является случай с петербургским бизнесменом Виталием Архангельским, получившим политическое убежище во Франции. Уже три года он преследуется связанным с властью банком, включая и Болгарию, где у него имеется собственность. Кто такой Виталий Архангельский? Сейчас трудно представить себе, что в мёртвой петле брежневского застоя, советский учёный получил нобелевскую премию не за что иное, как за экономику. В 1975 г. петербургский математик Леонид Канторович и его американский коллега Тьяллинг Купманс стали лауреатами за "свой вклад в теорию оптимального распределения ресурсов". 15 лет спустя экономика СССР обрушилась, являясь красноречивым примером расхождения между теорией и практикой. Вклад Канторовича и Купманса, однако, не был оспорен, так как их линейная математическая модель применима к "условиям конкурентного рынка", которого не существовало при советских реалиях. В том же, нобелевском, 1975 г. у Канторовича родился внук - Виталий. В конце 90-ых, после окончания экономического факультет в Санкт-Петербурге и специализации в Германии и Норвегии, Виталий Архангельский решил применить свои теоретические знания в дикой реальной экономике постсоветской России. С помощью больших кредитов он выкупил акции двух крупнейших балтийских портов: Санкт-Петербурга и Выборга, которые, в это время, находились в разрухе. Результат его менеджмента можно увидеть в следующем сравнении: в 1997 г. порт Выборга имел 8 причалов и 100 000 тонн грузооборота в год, а в 2012 г. с 5 работающими причалами реализовал 1 000 000 тонн за 9 месяцев. Активы управляемой Архангельским "Осло Марин Групп", которая кроме портов имела страховую и транспортную составляющую, быстро расли. В 2009 г. Архангельский уже считается миллиардером, но вскоре после этого особенности российской реальности напомнили ему о том, что не легко быть независимым от власти миллиардером. Переход психологической границы в один миллиард, по-видимому, активирует другие процессы, не имеющие ничего общего с условиями конкурентного рынка. Власть направляет взор на удачный бизнес молодого предпринимателя и останавливает прогрессивный рост группы. Один из главных кредиторов - банк "Санкт-Петербург" - осуществляет классическую рейдерскую атаку на "Осло Марин Групп", с целью захвата её бизнеса. В 2010 г. у "Осло Марин Групп" имеется долг в размере 2,5 млрд рублей перед банком „Санкт-Петербург”, который неожиданно решает расторгнуть договор о кредите и потребовать целиком долг, до этого момента регулярно обслуживаемый и обеспеченный активами в сотни миллионов долларов. Архангельский получает угрозу лично от руководителя и мажоритарного акционера банка Александра Савельева. Его принуждают передать банку огромные активы за ничтожную сумму денег. После этого рейдерского набега бизнесмен решает, что для него уже не безопасно и уезжает вместе с семьей во Францию, где у него есть квартира. Однако, захват бизнеса это не достаточно для банка, среди акционеров которого числится сам Путин (230 акций). Основной акционер Сергей Матвиенко, сын бывшего губернатора Санкт-Петербурга, ныне председателя Совета Федерации Валентины Матвиенко, которая является особо верным кадром в клане президента Путина. Банк представляет властям документ с подписью Архангельского, согласно которому он обеспечил корпоративный кредит своим личным имуществом. Банк претендует на то, что предприниматель использовал деньги на покупку недвижимости за рубежом. Гражданско-правовой спор молниеносно превращается в публично-правовой и в июле 2010 г. в отношении Архангельского выдвинуто обвинение в присвоении кредита и мошенничестве (статья 159 УК РФ), а впоследствии и в отмывании денег. Российское обвинение настойчивым образом требует от французских властей экстрадицию Архангельского, объявленного в международный розыск. 15 ноября 2010 г. он арестован и знакомится с условиями французской тюрьмы, в камере которой он находился в компании болгарского сутенёра. "Я знаю всё о подборе болгарских проституток и их эксплуатации во Франции" - шутит сегодня бывший российский миллиардер и французский заключённый. 1 декабря 2010 г. Апелляционный суд в Экс-ан-Провансе вынес приговор, что Архангельский является жертвой "политически мотивированных обвинений криминализированной судебной системы в России", отменяет гарантию в размере 300 000 евро и отказывает экстрадировать его в Россию. О качестве и достоверности российского обвинительного акта можно судить по заключению французского суда, который изложение российского прокурора определил как "несвязное и мутное". Домогания путинской прокуратуры отклонены следующими мотивами: "серьёзные сомнения насчет справедливости судебной процедуры... и насчет эффективности реализации права на защиту". После этого Архангельский просит политического убежища и создаёт прецедент. Он становится первым крупным российским предпринимателем, получившим защиту как политический беженец во Франции. В то же время французская экспертиза доказывает, что подпись Архангельского на договоре поручительства является подделкой. В начале 2011 г. он подаёт во Франции встречный иск о мошенничестве и фальсификации. Со своей стороны, банк, кроме наказательных механизмов экстрадиции, заводит также гражданско-правовое дело о конфискации недвижимости российского беженца с помощью так называемой экзекватуры (приведение в исполнение решения суда другого государства согласно двустороннего договора о юридической помощи). Суд рассматривает внимательным образом все факты по делу и выносит решение не давать ход процедуре экзекватуры пока не будет рассмотрена жалоба Архангельского на фальсификацию его подписи на обеспечительном договоре. Французская прокуратура уже потребовала официально от России допросить руководство банка „Санкт-Петербург”. "Даже если Россия откажет в сотрудничестве с французскими властями, что весьма вероятно, франция начнет заочный судебный процесс против ответственных за мошенничество людей и выплат серьёзных компенсаций моему клиенту" - считает адвокат Уильям Бурдон, защитник интересов Архангельского во Франции, где он также завёл судебные дела. “Несмотря на тот факт, что банк пытался ввести в заблуждение французское правосудие и получить решение об экстрадиции Архангельского, которому Франция дала убежище, попытки преследования его и его семьи продолжаются. Это похоже на битву Давида и Голиафа: лишить г-на Архангельского всей его собственности. Он бьется голыми руками с противником, имеющим неограниченные ресурсы и административную поддержку российского правительства." – прокомментировал специально для сайта „Биволъ” французский адвокат Франсуа Амели. „Биволъ” задал вопросы по электронной почте руководства банка „Санкт-Петербург”, с тем чтобы выяснить какая часть претензий банка уже удовлетворена и получить комментарий по французской экспертизе, доказавшей фальсификацию. До выхода этой статьи ответ не был получен. Преследуют ли Архангельского российские власти? – спросили мы известного российского диссидента Владимира Буковского, лежавшего в психиатрических клиниках при Брежневе и обмененного на чилийского коммуниста Луиса Корвалана в 1976 г. Его ответ не задержался: "Запад должен понять один простой житейский факт: нет правового порядка в сегодняшней России, а то, что Россия называет правовой системой, по сути, точно наоборот: коррупция, произвол, угнетение, которые разъедают Россию как рак, и подобно раку имеют тенденцию распространяться. Чтобы сохранить свою целостность, западная судебная система должна прекратить сотрудничество с российскими властями и применить подход "нулевой терпимости" к любому требованию с их стороны. Иначе Кремль продолжит злоупотреблять инструментами международного юридического сотрудничества - такие как Интерпол и соглашения об экстрадиции - и через гражданские судебные дела продолжит преследование своих политических оппонентов или просто грабить людей. Случай Виталия Архангельского это лишь самый свежий тому пример." - подробно изложил свою позицию Буковский. Последние новости из Франции говорят о том, что терзание Архангельского и его семьи осуществляется не только правовыми средствами. 21 октября сего года неизвестные лица напали на его супругу и детей перед их квартирой в Ницце и попытались проникнуть внутрь. Французские власти ведут расследоване данного нападения. Российская экзекватура и болгарское правосудие Перед тем как купить недвижимость во Франции, Виталий Архангельский часто посещал Болгарию. Он купил 30 квартир в комплексе класса люкс „Эмеральд Ризорт” рядом с Равдой. Это тот же самый комплекс, куда инвестировали российские поп-звёзды как Филипп Киркоров, Лоллита Милявская и другие известные лица российской эстрады. Летом 2011 г. все эти знаменитости вместе пожаловались в эфире самого популярного российского телеканала на проблемы с руководством комплекса и пригрозили судом из-за высокой оплаты за поддержку недвижимости. Расследование сайта „Биволъ” показало, что данный комплекс построен Огняном Бозаровым - племянником Тодора Живкова, бывшим агентом научно-технической разведки Первого главного управления Госбезопасности, активным участником в проекте "Нева", через который утонули в неизвестность миллионы долларов государственных денег. Его российский партнёр Алексей Чепа является депутатом Государственной Думы и также связан со спецслужбами, точнее с военной разведкой ГРУ. Продажи квартир в „Эмеральде” российским гражданам осуществлялись в Латвии уплатой наличными деньгами, утверждают собственники в жалобах болгарским правоохранительным органам. В документах на право собственности, однако, не указана реальная цена, а лишь половина стоимости недвижимости, и таким образом Бозаров и компания сэкономили на налогах и сборах в Болгарии. Сам Архангельский подтвердил эту практику перед сайтом „Биволъ”. Но зачем ему нужны целые 30 квартир? Чтобы получить прибыль от сезонной аренды и перепродажи в момент повышения цены - объясняет петербургский предприниматель. "В то время это была смешная сумма, все таки у меня был миллиард". Сегодня, однако, бывшему миллиардеру не до смеха. Не только потому, что кризис обрушил цены на недвижимость. Основная часть состояния Архангельского уже находится в руках банка „Санкт-Петербург”, который, как было сказано раньше, имеет судебное решение на арест его имущества где бы оно не находилось. В Болгарии банк тоже подал иск признать решение российского суда, или экзекватуру, по которой можно будет отнять те 30 квартир. В Болгарии единственным судом имеющим компетенцию рассматривать процедуры по экзекватуре является Софийский городской суд. Там дело Архангельского попало к судье Божане Желязковой, известной своим абсурдным требованием привести в зал суда в качестве свидетеля раненного и находившегося в коме Манола Велева по делу о попечительстве, которое было заведено супругой последнего, Веселой Лечевой. Оно продолжалось годами, пока наконец в 2009 г. Высший судебный совет не возбудил дисциплинарное производство в отношении Желязковой. "Кроме казуса "Манол Велев", проверка установила также серьёзные нарушения в работе судьи по другим делам. Её основными прегрешениями являются необоснованная длительная задержка вынесения приговоров по производствам различного характера, но кроме этого, только ей передавались дела об арестах имущества, не смотря на то, что подобные дела должны распределяться по случайному принципу." - пишет журнал „Правовой Мир”. Однако, в случае с иском банка "Санкт-Петербург" Желязкова оказалась необычайно торопливой. Всего за два месяца она решает уважить требование об экзекватуре. В противоположность французскому суду, болгарский суд не обращает никакое внимание на экспертизу, подтверждающую фальсификацию подписи Архангельского. Судью Желязкову не впечатляет даже тот факт, что в день, когда был подписан поддельный документ, Архангельский находился в Болгарии и он это доказывает штампом пограничного контрольно-пропускного пункта в его международном паспорте. Формальные основания для данного решения можно найти в законе и они придают ему некоторую правомерность. В процедуре по экзекватуре суд не обязан рассматривать по существу решение бывшего советского, а нынче российского суда. Согласно болгарскому суду, достаточно, если иностранный суд является компетентным, ответчику вручена копия искового заявления и он был должным образом вызван в суд. В этом случае не имеет значение требование нашего национального законодательства того, чтобы экзеквтура не противоречила болгарскому общественному порядку. Соблюдая формальности вполне можно проигнорировать основные правовые принципы, которые дают гарантии справедливого процесса и соблюдение прав человека - прокомментировали для сайта „Биволъ” болгарские адвокаты Архангельского. Курица не птица - для болгарского суда не существует европейская граница Но проблема расхождения между французским и болгарским подходами к "делу Архангельского", как говорит Буковский, ещё и политическая. Экзекватура может быть опасным инструментом в руках российской власти, контролирующей "криминализированную систему правосудия". С помощью этого механизма преследование неудобных переносится и на территорию Европейского союза. Именно это заметил и учёл французский суд. Его болгарский побратим, в качестве известного "троянского коня" России в ЕС, закрыл свои глаза, по крайней мере на первой инстанции. К чему ведёт подобное несоответствие между европейской и болгарской судебной практикой лучше всего можно увидеть из статистики приговоров против Болгарии в Страсбурге. У неё чёткий денежный эквивалент - компенсации, которые государство платит выигравшим дела в Европейском суде по правам человека. Таким образом, если российский банк все же выиграет дело в Болгарии, а Архангельский и его адвокаты выиграют дело во Франции, весьма вероятно, когда нибудь, болгарскому налогоплательщику придётся раскошелиться ещё и за 30 квартир в комплексе „Эмеральд”, в которых он, налогоплательщик, никогда не будет проживать. Это будет наградой за то, что Болгария стала 27-ой страной членом ЕС вместе с правосудием, оставшимся в наследие от несбывшейся 16-той республики СССР. Потому что претензии банка к Архангельскому основываются на Договоре о правовой взаимопомощи между Народной республикой Болгарией и СССР от 1975 г.

IF WOODWARD AND BERNSTEIN WERE BULGARIAN

THE WIKILEAKS COPYCAT THAT WORKED The following is the first of three articles adapted from Andy Greenberg's This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim To Free the World’s Information,out now from Dutton. Atanas Tchobanov doesn’t look much like Julian Assange. The smallish Bulgarian man has a shaved head, elfin ears, and a perpetual few days’ growth of salt-and-pepper stubble. When we meet in front of the roaring Fontaine St. Michel in Paris in the summer of 2011, he wears a T-shirt promoting Bivol, the tiny news site that he co-founded, with its logo of a Bulgarian buffalo and its slogan in Cyrillic: “Horns ahead!” But when we sit down at a café outside the Sorbonne University nearby, he flashes an Assange-like impish smile, and for an Assange-like reason: Apart from his day job at Bivol, Tchobanov is the co-founder of BalkanLeaks, the closest thing Eastern Europe has to its very own WikiLeaks. And BalkanLeaks is on a roll. “We just got two new leaks,” he says in an accent that has layers of French and Bulgarian. “And they’re good ones.” In the months leading up to our meeting, WikiLeaks’s slow release of a quarter million secret State Department memos from around the world had inspired a sudden flood of copycats. I had set out to find out which ones could actually replicate and systematize WikiLeaks’ work among the crowd of imitators: BaltiLeaks, BritiLeaks, BrusselsLeaks, Corporate Leaks, CrowdLeaks, EnviroLeaks, FrenchLeaks, GlobaLeaks, Indoleaks, IrishLeaks, IsraeliLeaks, Jumbo Leaks, KHLeaks, LeakyMails, Localeaks, MapleLeaks, MurdochLeaks, Office Leaks, Porn WikiLeaks, PinoyLeaks, PirateLeaks, QuebecLeaks, RuLeaks, ScienceLeaks, TradeLeaks, and UniLeaks, to name a few. Mainstream media outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, and Sweden’s public radio service had set up their own experimental leak portals. Hackers within Anonymous launched HackerLeaks. The leaking scene had become so crowded that two environmentally focused sites, GreenLeaks.com and GreenLeaks.org, threatened legal action against each other over the rights to the name. As Nation blogger Greg Mitchell noted, only one thing was missing from this newborn leaking movement: leaks. Nearly all of the copycat sites were publishing little or nothing. Even WikiLeaks’ own anonymous submission system had been shut down after the mutiny of several of the site’s engineers. The newborn leaking movement had found itself in a drought. With one exception. In December 2010, BalkanLeaks had come online, with a slogan across its masthead: “The Balkans aren’t keeping secrets anymore.” When I checked out the site, I saw that it used the well-tested anonymity software called Tor for submissions, a rare sign of security smarts among the new crop of copycats. But otherwise it resembled all the other obscure and leakless WikiLeaks wannabes from Brussels to Jakarta. Later that month, BalkanLeaks posted a Microsoft Word file with a note saying that the document had been submitted to the site’s Tor server. It was an agreement from the Bulgarian Department of Energy outlining the construction of a nuclear power plant as a joint project of Russia and Bulgaria, with no clear evidence of corruption. Hardly the world’s juiciest leak. Just days later, another document appeared on the site, again obtained through Tor. This one was a letter from one prosecutor to another, including a list of 30 Bulgarian names, all the prosecutors and judges in the highest levels of the country’s courts who were also Freemasons. “It is not illegal [to be a Freemason],” BalkanLeaks’ note in Bulgarian posted with the document read. “But does their oath to protect the public interest take precedence over their oath to the ‘brotherhood’? Perhaps the chairman of the Ethics Commission, Tsoni Tsonev, who is a member of the Masonic lodge, has an answer to this question.” Bulgaria’s contribution to the leaking movement was warming up. The next leak came shortly after, and it was a whopper: 100 pages of documents. They represented the full transcript of hours upon hours of wiretaps in a bribery case against Bulgaria’s former minister of defense, a judge, and the former secretary general of the Ministry of Public Finance. They contained frank discussions of how much every level of the judiciary demanded in bribes for various matters, so many hundreds of Bulgarian lev for this crime, so many thousands for this contract. “This is the first publication of the full texts of these recordings, which are a true guide to the methodology of bribery in the judiciary,” BalkanLeaks’ representatives wrote. The site had its first real scoop, and the lone Bulgarian trickle of leaks kept flowing. A few months later, the site published a Greek criminal complaint against a high-level Bulgarian prosecutor. Then transcribed, suppressed testimony of a witness saying that he had been pressured by a prosecutor to change his opinion in a Sofia real estate case. Then a list of the partial names and identification numbers of 37 previously unexposed ex-members of the Darzhavna Sigurnost, Bulgaria’s brutal secret police during the country’s Communist era. BalkanLeaks had arrived: a lone beacon of success in the leaking diaspora. All of which is what brought me to a café outside the Sorbonne to meet this shorter, Slavic version of Julian Assange. Of the two leaks that Tchobanov has obtained just before our Paris meeting, one is disappointlingly tame: the budget for the national Bulgarian railways, showing that they’re deeply in debt. The other is significantly more interesting. It’s the full transcript of the trial of Angel Donchev, a Bulgarian prosecutor who was recently found guilty of blackmailing another prosecutor, threatening him with a corruption investigation and a raid by the dreaded antimafia police known as the “berets.” “Juicy stuff,” says Tchobanov with a tilt of his head and a giggle. And how did BalkanLeaks succeed where the rest of the WikiLeak-alikes failed? Partly, perhaps, through Tchobanov’s sterling reputation in Bulgaria, as well as that of his in-country partner, Assen Yordanov. Both BalkanLeakers are seen as incorruptible reporters in a country where most are either “scared or bought,” as Tchobanov puts it. Bulgaria languishes near the bottom of Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom list among EU countries, and has a long tradition of violence against journalists, from the Ricin-tipped umbrella that poisoned Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978 to the fatal shooting of mafia-focused reporter Bobi Tsankov in 2010. But Tchobanov attributes the leak site’s rare success to its religious adherence to strong anonymity—the same faceless online whistleblowing used by WikiLeaks to lend new courage to leakers. No submissions are accepted via e-mail, Facebook messages, or the chat protocol IRC; they are accepted only through its cryptographically anonymous Tor server, which requires leakers to run the Tor anonymity software to upload documents. “Tor is not friendly,” says Tchobanov. “We wrote a detailed explanation of how to install it, how to connect, and so on. But it’s something pedagogical. We have to teach people to use anonymity, force them to use it.” He admits that the system’s inflexibility has likely turned some leakers away. “In the end, we chose less usability and more anonymity. And it worked. We got submissions. In the long run, it pays to have that confidence. We became trusted because we don’t give away our sources. Because we don’t even know who they are.” HOW TO LEAK A SECRET IN BULGARIA The following is the second of three articles adapted from Andy Greenberg's This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim To Free the World’s Information,out now from Dutton. Read the first part here. When Assen Yordanov ended his career as a buffalo shepherd and became an investigative reporter, one of his early scoops involved sneaking into to an illegal cigarette factory north of his hometown of Burgas in 1995. Yordanov’s story led to the factory’s shutdown and a two-year police investigation, but no arrests. He did, however, receive his first death threat, a letter warning him to “reserve a place in the cemetery for his tomb.” And he made his first acquaintance with Bulgaria’s most powerful man. “One of those men involved in this factory that I exposed was Boyko Borisov,” Yordanov told me when we met in a sunny café in the Bulgarian Black Sea resort town of Varvara. Yordanov is a broad-shouldered man in a black T-shirt, with a half-week’s worth of stubble, and he’s taken off his pair of scuffed Oakley knockoffs to show me the serious expression behind them. “Today, he is the prime minister of Bulgaria. And sixteen years ago I showed that he is a criminal.” In 1995, Yordanov’s accusations against Borisov hadn’t stuck. In 2011, with the help of WikiLeaks’ model of anonymously leaked documents, he would have another shot. Yordanov and his smaller, techier partner Atanas Tchobanov met in 2008, when Tchobanov, a Bulgarian expatriate in Paris working with Reporters Without Borders, interviewed Yordanov about a knife ambush that had nearly killed Yordanov outside his home in the eastern Bulgarian city of Burgas. Yordanov believed the attackers were linked with a story about corrupt real estate deals he had written. But he had no intention of backing down. Instead, he wanted Tchobanov to help him go further, to launch their own investigative news website. They called it Bivol, the Bulgarian word for Yordanov’s favorite animal, the buffalo. And despite running it with near-zero budget, the rare independent Bulgarian media outlet had immediate impact. Rumiana Jeleva, Bulgaria’s foreign minister, was set to be confirmed as a representative of the European Commission. Yordanov and Tchobanov helped to uncover financial ties she had failed to disclose, showing that she continued to own a consulting company long after she had claimed to have no interests in it. The story contributed to an investigation of Jeleva that was picked up in foreign media and finally led to her resignation from not only the EU post, but also her ministry position. But Tchobanov could sense that Yordanov’s traditional breed of muckraking was endangered: In September of 2008, the journalist Ognyan Stefanov had been stopped outside a Sofia restaurant one night and brutally beaten with hammers and steel bars, left for dead with broken arms and legs and a severe concussion that he barely survived. In this case, the attack had a new twist: The victim had attempted—and failed—to remain anonymous. Stefanov was secretly the editor of the blog Opasnite Novini—“Dangerous News”—that 10 days before had published a story based on a leak that showed officials in the new intelligence agency DANS were involved in a smuggling ring. DANS, whose name translates to “National Security Agency,” had been formed the same year, supposedly to fight organized crime. Somehow it had identified Stefanov. In a government investigation that followed Stefanov’s beating and through more anonymous leaks to the press, DANS was revealed to be engaged in mass wiretapping of journalists and government officials. (By 2010, the Bulgarian government would perform around 15,000 wiretaps annually, close to 200 times the number per capita reported in the United States that year.) The mass surveillance and intimidation tactics of the Communist-era Darzhavna Sigurnost were alive and thriving. Tchobanov knew that Bivol needed new ways to protect itself and its sources. So he simply typed “anonymous submissions” into Google. Soon he began to discover the cypherpunks’ many gifts to journalists: the email encryption program PGP, Off-the-Record encrypted instant messaging, the anonymity software Tor. And WikiLeaks. The Bulgarian technophile was immediately fascinated by the site’s technical methods and utter fearlessness. He began to monitor its leaks closely, and even experimented with uploading an unverified document that a source had sent him, in the hopes that this mysterious group might be able to authenticate it and publish it to a global audience. The document, written in Bulgarian, never surfaced on the site. It was only after the Cablegate release that Tchobanov began to consider the full power of WikiLeaks’ model—not just to protect journalism, but potentially to advance it. In a Skype chat with a few other journalists and technologists who worked on and off with Bivol, they proposed the idea of a leaking site that would publish locally focused documents that WikiLeaks wouldn’t, a leaking syringe targeted at the Balkans and its neighbors rather than a hose aimed at the world at large: BalkanLeaks. Within days, they had registered the URL and set up an SSL-encryption-protected site and a Tor Hidden Service in an OVH data center in the French city of Roubaix, the same one that briefly housed WikiLeaks’ publications until they migrated to Sweden. To Tchobanov and Yordanov’s delight, the documents flowed into BalkanLeaks’ submissions portal immediately, from the nuclear power agreement to the judicial bribery tapes: solid, irrefutable primary-source evidence obtained with cryptographic anonymity. But the Bulgarians, like Julian Assange, weren’t merely seeking to prove the power of cryptography and anonymity to slice through institutional secrecy; like all good journalists, they were on the scent of the biggest possible stories—and they smelled them hidden deep in the still-unpublished majority of the WikiLeaks cables, a trove of documents that, as Bradley Manning had promised in his leaked chat logs, affected every country in the world. In February of 2011, nearly three months after Cablegate began, only 5,000 of the quarter million cables had actually been leaked. WikiLeaks lacked the necessary manpower to read the endless memos and redact the names of at-risk sources, and had put out a call on its Twitter feed for more media organizations to participate. Tchobanov emailed a plea to a WikiLeaks contact to give the 978 cables from the embassy in Sofia to Bivol. No response. One released cable in particular had tantalized and galled Tchobanov and Yordanov: It was a 2005 briefing by U.S. Ambassador James Pardew on the state of organized crime in Bulgaria and its extraordinarily cozy ties to government. But after the memo’s redactions by WikiLeaks’ partners at the Guardian, it contained no specific names of Bulgarians. The Guardian had used the cable to construct a story on Russian influence in Bulgaria’s mafia world, but hadn’t been able to confirm any of the allegations against Bulgarians themselves. So the paper simply snipped huge portions of the text, mostly from a section titled “Who’s Who in Bulgarian Organized Crime.” Of the cable’s original 5,226 words, all but 1,406 were missing. Luckily for Tchobanov and Yordanov, WikiLeaks’ control of the cables was itself beginning to spring leaks. One of the group’s erstwhile partners, a freelance journalist and controversial Holocaust denier named Israel Shamir, had obtained a portion of the unredacted cables and was using them to write stories for the Moscow magazine Russian Reporter. Tchobanov wrote him an email in February asking about the contents of the Bulgarian cable. To his surprise, Shamir soon responded with the full text. A few days after the Guardian’s Bulgaria story, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten announced that it had also inexplicably gained access to the full set of cables. So Tchobanov wrote to Aftenposten, asking the papers’ editors to verify the text that Shamir had sent him. They wrote back, confirming that Shamir’s slice of the megaleak was the real deal. The unredacted cable was an encyclopedia of Bulgarian organized crime, with entries for every major group: gangs with names like Multigroup, Intergroup, TIM, the Union of Former Commandos, and the Amigos. It cataloged their involvement in all flavors of crime from tax fraud to smuggling, extortion to sexual slavery. It followed the flow of money to every major political party, and named government officials who openly consorted with the groups or had made the transition from mafioso to politician. The cable named towns like Svilengrad and Velingrad that were controlled entirely by mafia-cum-government. Bivol published a story on the report, titled simply “Bulgarian Organized Crime, Uncensored.” Other Bulgarian newspapers picked up on the story. One, the paper Capital, headlined it simply “Black and White”; the cable had confirmed in stark terms all the corruption that had been suspected for years. As usual, no one was indicted, perhaps the strongest evidence of all of the government’s symbiosis with criminals. For Bivol, the most important reaction came from WikiLeaks itself. The group published the unredacted version of the cable on its site rather than the version of the cable that had been gutted by the Guardian, and accused the newspaper on its Twitter feed of “cable cooking.” Tchobanov wrote to WikiLeaks again, suggesting that instead of the Guardian, the group hand all of its Bulgarian cables to Bivol. This time WikiLeaks’ staff wrote back, asking for time to look into Bivol’s background and to learn more about Tchobanov and Yordanov. Three weeks later, they got their response: an invitation to Ellingham Hall in the U.K. for a meeting with Julian Assange. Monday: BalkanLeaks obtains and publishes Bulgaria’s own Watergate—and tests the limits of the media’s power to fight a fundamentally corrupt government. IF WOODWARD AND BERNSTEIN WERE BULGARIAN The following is the third of three articles adapted from Andy Greenberg's This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim To Free the World’s Information,out now from Dutton. Read the first part here and the second part here. When Atanas Tchobanov and Assen Yordanov set out to meet Julian Assange, their first hours in England went badly. Yordanov left his laptop in an overhead bin on the airplane and they spent hours trying to retrieve it from the airline. The Bulgarian pair got lost on the drive from London to Norfolk after Tchobanov’s GPS stopped working. And on one of the roundabouts, Tchobanov forgot to drive on the left and caused a minor collision with an oncoming car. When they finally reached Ellingham, they found the WikiLeaks founder dressed in a gray suit and in a dour mood. He seemed preoccupied, Tchobanov and Yordanov remember, with his legal fate and the financial industry’s ongoing blockade choking donations to WikiLeaks. Assange also worried that the pair, like WikiLeaks’ rogue partner Israel Shamir, might redistribute the cables willy-nilly, and had prepared a contract that held them responsible for redacting names of sensitive State Department sources before publishing the cables. It also stipulated that they only access the unredacted files from a computer with no Internet connection. But the Australian WikiLeaks founder also praised BalkanLeaks, Yordanov and Tchobanov told me. He said he had looked over the submission site’s security and approved of its simple rigor. And he seemed to enjoy the homemade rakija that Yordanov had presented him as a gift. “By the time we opened the second bottle, I knew that he would give us the documents,” says Yordanov with a grin. They made arrangements to hand over the Bulgarian embassy files securely, and returned home. When they accessed the full documents back in Burgas a month later, they found the wealth of scandals they had hoped for. One cable showed that Bulgarian officials in the United States had accumulated parking tickets totaling more than $400,000, so many that the United States had threatened to withhold nearly half a million dollars in aid until they were paid. One cable listed all the Bulgarian banks that engaged in money laundering and corrupt loans. And then they came upon the greatest prize of all, a cable that dealt with the same subject Yordanov had first tackled 16 years earlier: Boyko Borisov, Bulgaria’s prime minister. It was a 2006 memo from the U.S. ambassador in Sofia, John Beyrle, on the subject of Borisov, predicting his run for the prime minister post and titled “Bulgaria’s Most Popular Politician: Great Hopes, Murky Ties.” The cable began by describing Borisov as “implicated in serious criminal activity” and maintaining “close ties to Lukoil and the Russian Embassy.” It then tells Borisov’s entire life story, starting with his youth as a “neighborhood tough” in a gang on the edges of Sofia, how he founded a private security firm “and built it into one of the biggest in the country at a time when ‘private security’ was synonymous with extortion and strong-arm tactics,” as the cable reads. As chief secretary, he reportedly paid cash for positive press coverage and threatened journalists who criticized him. Then the cable comes to another section labeled “The Dirt.” Accusations in years past have linked Borisov to oil-siphoning scandals, illegal deals involving LUKoil and major traffic in methamphetamines. … Borisov is alleged to have used his former position as head of Bulgarian law enforcement to arrange cover for criminal deals, and his common-law wife, Tsvetelina Borislavova, manages a large Bulgarian bank that has been accused of laundering money for organized criminal groups, as well as for Borisov’s own illegal trans- actions. Borisov is said to have close social and business ties to influential Mafia figures, including Mladen Mihalev (AKA “Madzho”), and is a former business partner of [organized crime] figure Roumen Nikolov (AKA “the Pasha”). “We should continue to push him in the right direction,” the cable concludes. “But never forget who we’re dealing with.” If a single document could ever be Bulgaria’s Watergate, this was it. And two journalists from a news website that no one had ever heard of were about to publish it. In December 2010, just as the first rounds of WikiLeaks’ State Department Cables were metastasizing around the Internet, I spoke with Evgeny Morozov, a Belarusian academic and writer with a famously pessimistic attitude toward the Internet’s ability to democratize global politics. Instead, he believes digital tools have only tightened governments’ control over their citizens. I ask him about WikiLeaks, and whether it might be an exception to his rule. He thinks not. “Information can embarrass governments, but you have to look at the nature of governments as well as the nature of information to measure this embarrassment factor,” he answers. In Russia or China, he specifies, corruption is already an open secret. “Just go and take photos of their villas and the summer houses they buy with their state salaries,” he says. “It’s already in the open, but exposure by itself in these countries doesn’t lead to democratic change.” And what about BalkanLeaks, the Bulgarian site that at that time was just starting to get its hands on some juicy documents? Bulgaria is a subject Morozov knows well: He studied for several years at the American University in Blagoevgrad. “I don’t know what information you could publish to embarrass the Balkans. It’s a tough one,” he says. “There’s an environment that’s so suffused with cynicism toward politicians that to me it’s hard to imagine what kind of stuff would need to be leaked.” In May 2011, BalkanLeaks put that cynicism to the test. It published the words of the U.S. ambassador that labeled Bulgaria’s prime minister a criminal several times over. The news reverberated around the country’s blogs and was written up in several newspapers. And then, as Morozov predicted, very little happened. In a display of frantic backpedaling, the U.S. embassy in Sofia released a statement backing Borisov. “While we cannot comment on the content of alleged classified materials which may have been leaked, we would like to underscore that the U.S. and Bulgaria share an excellent relationship and that our high level of bilateral cooperation speaks for itself.” Borisov himself angrily told one reporter who asked about his ties to Lukoil that “I do not read WikiLeaks,” and “will not comment on yellow press publications.” Soon the usual politics kicked in. The opposition party demanded a probe into the accusations. Borisov’s own party emphasized that the report’s release was an underhanded move timed to influence local elections. The country’s top prosecutor, Boris Velchev, refused to pursue the case. “If we allow an investigation to be opened on mere allegations, can you imagine what country we would be turning into?” he asked rhetorically. Borisov, it seemed, had emerged with hardly a scratch. A few months after that miniscandal, I ask Tchobanov if he’s satisfied with the results of his leaks. “Yes, I am quite satisfied with the impact,” he answers without hesitation. Several judges have been pushed out by various means since BalkanLeaks’ reports on bribery and the Masonic lodge, what he sees as internal housecleaning. And since the cable publication on the country’s prime minister, Borisov hasn’t been invited to meet with any other European leaders one-on-one, he says—they don’t want to be seen shaking hands with an “Armani-clad tough guy,” as the U.S. ambassador once secretly described him in a memo. The former minister of defense and two other officials exposed in BalkanLeaks’ early wiretapping transcripts have been charged with bribery, and their prosecution is ongoing. Others, like the prosecutor blackmailed by Angel Donchev, and another who pressured a witness to change his testimony in a real estate case, haven’t been charged with crimes. On a larger scale, the leaks may have also contributed to a decision by the Netherlands and Finland to veto Bulgaria’s accession to the EU’s visa-free Schengen travel zone based on concerns about organized crime—a clear sign from Bulgaria’s neighbors that it must clean up its mafia taint. But didn’t Tchobanov hope that the cable about Borisov would lead to his resignation? The soft-spoken Bulgarian asks for patience. He says that the full influence of the report still isn’t clear. “It’s a slow process. With the Pentagon Papers, nothing happened at first. But eventually there was Watergate,” he says. “First they ignore it, they fight it, then they finally accept it as evidence.” I offer the adage attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” “No,” Tchobanov responds without looking at me. “Sometimes you lose.” On my last day in Varvara, Tchobanov, Yordanov, and a group of friends invite me to go sailing in the Black Sea on a small boat with “Moby Dick” written on its side in Cyrillic. We drop anchor in a shallow cove with an isolated beach in the distance, populated by only a single tent and a pirate flag planted in the sand. He points off in the distance to a complex of unfinished four-story buildings on a cliff beside the beach, modern structures with diagonally expanding floors that lean out over the sea, with a round, bare concrete tower at their center. Yordanov explains that a story he wrote for the newspaper Politika exposed what would have been a luxury apartment development there as illegal construction, part of the series of investigations that eventually led to his being attacked by a group of thugs in Burgas. The news resulted in a government order to halt the construction we’re looking at. If not for that story, he says, the beach below would have been developed as private land. “I’m very proud my investigations can save this beach,” says Yordanov. “I’m very proud of my work.” Since Yordanov’s exposé, the apartments’ massive concrete skeleton has been left to rot. No one is allowed to finish building it, but no one has bothered to remove its carcass either. It stands instead as an enormous concrete Acropolis, a monument to a country caught between its impulse to develop and the corruption it can’t escape. As we climb back into the Moby Dick and sail toward Varvara, the newly constructed ruins loom over us from the cliff face and then recede into the distance.

Bulgarian Organized Crime Uncensored

The full uncensored text of the diplomatic cable about Bulgarian Organized Crime from 2005. At the end of November, 2010, the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks triggered the Cablegate scandal: the release of 251 287 secret American diplomatic cables. Currently, the site has published 5 000 cables or about 2% of the entire database. Eight of them are from the American Embassy in Sofia. The Wikileaks site has a total of 978 diplomatic cables from the US Embassy in Sofia. There are another 66 cables with the tag Bulgaria. On December 1, 2010, The Guardian published on its site the diplomatic cable of the American Embassy in Sofia dedicated to organized crime in Bulgaria. On December 7, 2010, Le Monde published an overview about the influence of Russian mafia in Europe, also citing the cable, signed by then Ambassador to Sofia, James Pardew. From the Le Monde article we learn that there is another cable, dated September 11, 2009, also focusing on the Bulgarian organized crime. It has a section titled “Russian Influence,” commenting on the representative of Michael Chorny in Bulgaria – attorney, Todor Batkov. The Embassy stresses on his solid political connections and the fact he has been awarded in 2008 by President, Georgi Parvanov, with the country’s highest order “Stara Planina.” Ten days after the Le Monde publication, on December 17, 2010, the Wikileaks site published the Guardian-censured version of the text of the diplomatic cable from July 7, 2005, signed by Ambassador James Pardew. The text of the September 2009, cable never saw daylight and currently only journalists from the publications, accredited by Wikileaks, know about it and its content. Why did The Guardian and Le Monde Conceal Information about Crime in Bulgaria? The stated policy of Wikileaks is to not publish the original texts of the cables, but rather censured versions, edited by the teams of their partner media, after the latter have examined the content of the documents. This way media, known for their professionalism and good reputation, offer a guarantee the names of informers and third parties and their identities would not be revealed. Wikileaks have chosen this model in order to not endanger the lives of intelligence agents and informers as it happened after the publication of documents about the US and its allies’ military operation in Afghanistan. At the time, even staunch supporters of freedom of speech, such as “Reporters without Borders,” voiced strong and grounded criticism of Julian Assange. One cannot help it, but note that in the published cable from July 7, 2005, the section “Who Is Who in Bulgarian Organized Crime” abounds with censored paragraphs. We can only guess the reason of the Guardian journalists to conceal individuals and businesses the Embassy believes are part of organized crime. The names of these individuals and businesses, along with information about alleged ties with organized crime, are nothing new for the Bulgarian and international audience. The cable further talks about financing of the election campaign of a certain political party in 2001; but the party’s name is deleted. So are names of cities and towns, the cable lists as being controlled by organized crime. It is unclear what would the exact danger be for the alleged organized crime personalities and politicians connected to them if their names are published. Obviously, in order to receive such protection, they have been, themselves, informers of Pardew. It is even more difficult to understand the Le Monde reasons to conceal an entire cable. The cover-up of this information does not help the effort for more transparency and civil intolerance for connections between the underworld and the power. This contradicts Wikileaks’ main idea – to make public documents, concealing from society the ulcers of organized crime, corruption, the dirty deals of those in power, and ties of political figures with them. It will be real pity if it turns out journalists from reputed international media use information, provided by Wikileaks as merchandise, whose value depends on the selection of the precise moment to offer it on the market. It is a fact that recently, a special envoy of the Le Monde, Petr Smolar, emerged in Sofia and met with journalists from the Galeria weekly, interviewed Alexey Petrov while he was still under house arrest and wrote an extensive article about the conflict between Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov and Petrov, with details about the wiretap scandal surrounding the use of special surveillance devices (SRS). Why Are We Publishing This Text? Bivol received the uncensored text of James Pardew’s cable, dated July 7, 2005. It was provided for us by the magazine “Russkiy Reporter” (Russian Reporter), which is preparing a publication about the influence of Russian mafia in Bulgaria. The magazine asked us to verify the authenticity of the names and the events, and to prepare comments on the faith of the emblematic organized crime bosses, cited in the cable. We must note that we have no contract or financial relations with “Russkiy Reporter,” its owners and its sources of information. Our professional contacts end with the work on this particular case: summarizing and offering factual information and our editorial analysis of the cable. The cable’s authenticity was confirmed by another source – the Norwegian paper Aftenposten, which has independent access to all diplomatic cables leaked through Wikileaks. We examined in detail the entire text and did not find in it a single name of a person that must be concealed for safety reasons, because they have provided information about organized crime to the American Embassy. We cannot sign under claims of involvement of the quoted individuals and companies with organized crime, like Ambassador Pardew did – he had available sources and methods of collecting information way beyond the possibilities of journalism. But, as the readers will see for themselves, the cable talks about the total invasion of the State by organized crime – no more and no less. The mafia, on its part, has a direct connection with the remnants of the Communist Secret Services (DS) and the Russian ones (KGB); a connection which we can say, without falling in the trap of conspiracy theories, is alive today. Bulgarians must further know this now, because the signing, with Russian monopolists, of some very controversial from economic and strategic point of view contracts for energy projects is pending: South Stream and the “Belene” Nuclear Power Plant. These projects were supported by NDSV (the decision to build “Belene” was made personally by Simeon Saxe-Coburg in the beginning of his term), by BSP and the President Parvanov. In 2005, Ambassador Pardew writes that individuals connected to both Bulgarian organized crime and Russian financial and economic interests in the energy sector have finances political campaigns of NDSV, BSP and President Parvanov in order to maintain their positions. Their names are spelled out in the cable. We also learn that oligarchs, close to now Prime Minister Borisov are considered by our American partners to be close to Russian intelligence. It is obvious, the financial influence of these circles is not an isolated occurrence, but rather an event that is reproduced in the political cycle. There is a real threat that it would become a factor during the forthcoming local and presidential elections as well. The voters have the right to know how, by whom, and for what reasons their trust is being transformed. Assessing the information from the point of view of public interest, we believe the only right thing to do is to publish the full, uncensored text of the cable. Ambassador Pardew’s Analysis As it has been said many times already – there is nothing new in the information provided by the secret American diplomatic cables. But the well-known old is offered in detail and systematically. The new, in this case, is that we can find out how one of the most successful American diplomats analyses the situation of organized crime in Bulgaria. Maybe the most important deduction is that the cable outlines in detail the reproduction cycle of the Mafia, coinciding with the political one: dirty money – political campaigns – managing the political institutions after the elections – establishment of rules favorable for money laundering and legalizing and expansion of criminal business. The cable quotes concrete names of individuals and companies, which still own and manage significant assets in Bulgaria. It examines the symbiosis of crime and power by the financing of election campaigns - NDSV by Vassil Bozhkov and Emil Kyulev in 2001; Georgi Parvanov this same year by Kyulev again, NDSV and BSP in 2005 by Bozhkov, Kyulev, and Sasho Donchev (Banker Kuylev had strong ties with Russian financial interests. Donchev is the Head of Overgaz, a GAZPROM intermediary selling Russian natural gas on the Bulgarian market). The cable further notes the trend of individuals coming from the organized crime circles to directly enter national-level politics or to directly control local power. A trend that, as we all know, became more and more pronounced in the years to follow. Maybe the climax of this cynicism would be the likely run of Alexey Petrov, an individual indicted for racket and blackmail, for President. The cable stresses on the legacy of the criminal Communist repressive apparatus for the figures of Bulgarian organized crime. In the beginning of the transition period, in addition to the now-notorious wrestlers, rowers and other sports competitors from the Communists training schools, former “blades” of the repressive system also entered organized crime groups – berets, navy seals and other special task forces, brought up and trained not to fight some external enemy, but to safeguard the favorites of the regime from the anger of the Bulgarian people. The above-mentioned, Alexey Petrov, and his associate Zlatomir Ivanov AKA Baretata (The Beret) are just two of the many examples. TIM – The Number One of Organized Crime, According to Pardew Under number one in “Who Is Who in Bulgarian Organized Crime,” Pardew lists the TIM group, which, similarly to the former Multigroup, is attempting to permeate all sectors of legal and illegal business. Today, Pardew’s words that the “up-and-coming star” of the TIM business empire is the most serious economic concern in Bulgaria sound particularly true. Under the GERB rule, companies connected to TIM impose, undisturbed, cartel prices on grain and consequently on bread and cooking oil, which is, in reality, a daylight robbery, affecting every single Bulgarian. The money from the “Saglasie” and “Sila” retirement funds, controlled by TIM, are redirected to another business of the group, while the authorities discretely close their eyes for these illegal transfers. On the backdrop of all this, the outrageous TIM project for Alley One, mentioned in the cable, appears to be an almost innocent business endeavor, but focuses the public attention on the attitude of GERB towards the Varna-based group. It is a fact that Boyko Borisov and Tsvetan Tsvetanov stubbornly refuse to comment on anything related to TIM; it is also a fact the GERB Member of the Parliament, Emil Radev, is a former navy seal, from the secret navy unit “Tihina,” famous for being the place of military service for the TIM bosses. This same Radev is lobbying to limit access to the Business Registry for investigative reporters seeking information about the crime groups and their legal business activities. Indeed, in 2005, Ambassador Pardew had no way of knowing TIM will acquire its greatest power under the GERB rule all while GERB ran its election campaign on promises to sever ties between political power and organized crime. These ties date from a long time ago. Documents from the Business Registry, show Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov, had been a co-owner, along with Rumen Nikolov aka The Pasha, from SIK, and Ivo Kamenov, from TIM, of a factory, producing contraband cigarettes in 1995. The Dead-Lock of the Fight against Organized Crime In November, 2010, the New York Times noted the dead-lock of organized crime after the not-guilty verdicts of the Galevi Brothers and The Beret’s release from jail. At that time, we still did not know that “The Octopus,” Alexey Petrov, would also be let walk free mainly over the inability of the prosecution to make their charges hold water in court. So, the most advertised police operation, the symbol of the resolve of the government to fight the mafia, began turning into a farce. This dead-lock has several causes: A Helpless Court System This feeling of impasse is becoming stronger by the impression of helplessness of the prosecution. As if on purpose, prosecutors make grave mistakes in the indictments in high-profile cases; delay and doom to failure trials while ties between prosecutors and people from the underworld are public knowledge. Here is a concrete example – one early morning, a wanted by the police gangster was arrested in the home of prosecutor Parvoleta Nikova, who had worked on the Galevi case. The Supreme Judicial Council (VSS), however, does not see this cohabitation as reproachable and as a problem for the image of the judicial power. The case with the lobbyist, known as “Krasio the Black,” reveals the ugly interdependence of magistrates, the business and politicians, but there had been no probe and charges of trading influence. Despite the endless appeals in Brussels’ reports, the true reform of the judicial system looks more and more problematic and impossible. State Security Everywhere Another demoralizing moment is the mass presence of former collaborators of the Communist State Security (DS) in the now Security Services, surviving every government over the lack of political will for full lustration. Under the Communist regime precisely the State Security (DS) agents were the individuals organizing and protecting criminal activities such as the manufacturing and distribution of illegal drugs, support of terrorist organizations and physical extermination of opponents of the regime. DS employess were the executors of the State policy of patronizing criminal activities. After President Parvanov took office, a person who had also been a DS agent, many former DS employees were reinstated in the Security Services. This odd restoration continued with Rumen Petkov becoming Interior Minister. He resigned after it was revealed he held a meeting with the “persons of interest,” the Galevi Brothers, organized through the intercession of Alexey Petrov. In 2008 – 2009, Petrov was appointed Special Advisor to the Director of the State Agency for National Security (DANS), Petko Sertov, and, as many experts believe, Petrov actually ran the most powerful secret service in the country. Currently hundreds of former DS agents and collaborators are employed in the structures of the Interior Ministry and DANS, some at high-ranking positions. Despite the show-off rhetoric of GERB, they failed to undertake a serious lustration move in these law enforecement instituions. The “Unhealthy” Ties between Politics and Business Let’s remind that the owner of DZI Bank, Emil Kyulev, a former Interior Ministry employee, is among the advisors of President Parvanov, mentioned in the cable. Kyulev was gunned down in October, 2005, on “Bulgaria” boulevard in Sofia; together with the other shooting victim from 2007, Manol Velev (still in coma), they were members of the notorious “Vazrazhdane” club along with Vassil Bozhkov AKA The Scull, Dimitar Gushterov, Tosho Toshev, Radosvet Radev, and the also murdered, Iliya Pavlov. In the most current scandal, revolving around leaked taped phone conversations between Bulgarian Prime Minister Borisov and the Director of the Customs Agency, Tanov, where Borisov can be heard insisting on halting a probe against the owner of the “Ledenika” brewery, Mihail Mihov, intimately called by the PM “Misho The Beer,” it suddenly emerged that “The Beer” attorney was Sacho Penov, the same Penov who was the Chair of the President’s Legal Counsel. The EU funds were frozen over another connection of the President – Lyudmil Stoykov, former representative of VIS-2 in Pernik. Despite OLAF’s revelations of criminal abuse of the SAPARD funds in the amount of EUR 7 M, Lyudmil Stoykov was never sentenced. According to OLAF, Stoykov has been provided a political cover-up from the highest place. The economic influence of individuals, listed in the cable as having ties with organized crime, continued to expand over the year with the active collaboration of the State, which in reality subsidized their business. Todor Batkov, attorney for Michael Chorny, received a land swap for hundreds of decares near the sea and was bestowed by the President with the “Stara Planina” order. Businesses and people connected to Vassil Bozhkov AKA The Scull, and Grisha Ganchev, also obtained priceless plots through scandalous land swaps. Instead of annulling the contracts and seeking responsibility, the new GERB cabinet temporarily limited construction on plots acquired through land swaps… until a more favorable time. Can the EU Rescue Bulgaria from the Mafia? The notorious saying that “in Bulgaria the mafia has a State,” becomes alive by what Pardew has written. The Ambassador bitterly notes the society’s frustration from its helpless situation. Pardew believes the tools of influence of the EU are crucial. “If the EU uses this leverage to demand not only far-reaching judicial reform but effective implementation as well, there is reason to hope that the tide will slowly begin to turn against organized crime in the coming years,” the Ambassador concludes. In Bulgaria, six years later, three of which as an EU Member State, many of the figures of organized crime, listed by Pardew in 2005, are no longer living. Some, like the Marguin Brothers were arrested and charged, but were exonerated after a long and grotesque court saga. Petar Petrov AKA The Amigos is the only one sentenced at first instance. Currently, none of the emblematic crime bosses has an effective sentence. Hellas, it becomes more and more clear, the citizens in this dead-lock cannot count on an effective external interference. The Wikileaks information is yet another proof the US understand the seriousness of this situation; offer logistics support, and lead an “aggressive policy” of denying entry visas to scandalous individuals (the latest case is the former Interior Minister, Rumen Petkov). The rest is up to Europe, because the Bulgarian mafia problem is now a problem for the citizens of all European countries. The question here is – do James Pardew and Bulgarians overrate the EU potential? Even more: judging by the reaction of the leading European newspapers, which concealed the real state of the matters, and reading the “soft” wording in the Brussels’ reports, we have doubts about the will and the capacity of Europe to change the situation in Bulgaria. There is lots of talk about pressure to fight organized crime, but at the same time, politicians with ties to DS and organized crime are serving as Members of the European Parliament while leading European companies do business with firms managed by people intelligence services suspect of criminal deals. Not long ago, Finance Minister, Simeon Djankov, commented economic problems in the country stem mostly from the fact that “wrestlers, Communists and Komsomol members” have invaded the business and it was “difficult” to work with them. They will be pushed out in a natural way, Djankov believes. It would be even more natural for the EU to announce a particular lustration for these “wrestlers, Communists and Komsomol members” by preparing a public list of the companies and individuals which are not suitable for doing business with. Pardew’s cable can be used as a helping tool, because it is, most likely, a copy of the list of the Fraud Prevention Unit in Sofia Embassy’s Consular Section. The full uncensored text of the diplomatic cable about Bulgarian Organized Crime from 2005.

Bulgarian PM Boyko Borisov – Major Methamphetamines Traffic and Dependency on Lukoil

"We must continue to walk a fine line between being used by Borisov's publicity machine and alienating an exceptionally popular and seemingly pro-American politician who may emerge as Bulgaria's next leader. In other words, we should continue to push him in the right direction, but never forget who we're dealing with." This is the conclusion of a diplomatic report dedicated to now Bulgarian Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov, sent by former US Ambassador to Sofia, Jonh Beyrle on May 9, 2006. The report’s confidentiality level is listed as SECRET/NOT FOR FOREIGNERS, only one level below the highest TOP SECRET – cables classified as TOP SECRET are not available to Wikileaks. The reasons for classifying the report are coded as 1.5 (b,d), meaning confidential sources have been used in its preparation. The cable has another characteristic – from a total of 978 reports sent from Sofia, there are just a few that have been checked and approved simultaneously by the Embassy’s political, military and security advisors, not just Ambassador Beyrle. "The Dirt" This is how Beyrle titled the section focusing on Boyko Borisov’s criminal past. Incidentally, the paragraph has the "lucky" number 13, while in the brackets, after 13, the level of confidentiality is purposely listed as SECRET/NOFOR, which corresponds to the highest level of classified information for this cable.13. (S/NF) Accusations in years past have linked Borisov to oil-siphoning scandals, illegal deals involving LUKoil and major traffic in methamphetamines. Information from SIMO tends to substantiate these allegations. Borisov is alleged to have used his former position as head of Bulgarian law enforcement to arrange cover for criminal deals, and his common-law wife, Tsvetelina Borislavova, manages a large Bulgarian bank that has been accused of laundering money for organized criminal groups, as well as for Borisov's own illegal transactions. Borisov is said to have close social and business ties to influential Mafia figures, including Mladen Mihalev (AKA "Madzho"), and is a former business partner of OC figure Roumen Nikolov (AKA "the Pasha")." In their desire to downplay the American diplomats’ reports, those affected point out these are simply rumors, pedantically registered by diligent clerks at the Embassy. But in this case, we have something far more serious: the collective work of nearly the entire diplomatic team, citing the mysterious SIMO, confirming information about Borisov’s participation in serious criminal activities. A check of the Wikileaks site where about 13000 cables have been published so far, found only 4 mention of SIMO. According to the context, SIMO appears to be an agency related to the security and information domains, participating in the Legal Enforcement Commettee of the Ambassador, together with other known US agencies such as DEA. The second paragraph in the "Dirt" section focuses on ties between Borisov and Valentin Zlatev, CEO of Lukoil, Bulgaria. "14. (S/NF) Borisov has close financial and political ties to LUKoil Bulgaria Director Valentin Zlatev, a vastly influential kingmaker and behind-the-scenes power broker. Borisov's loyalty (and vulnerability) to Zlatev play a major role in his political decision making. The Mayor has engaged LUKoil in a number of public-private partnerships since taking office: LUKoil has agreed to donate asphalt for the repair of city streets, take on the upkeep of a Soviet Army monument, and finance construction of low-income housing. In a reciprocal gesture, Borisov has advocated using municipal land to develop new LUKoil stations. Though this may seem a significant quid-pro-quo, Borisov's public agreements with LUKoil are only side deals in his much deeper and broader business relationship with Zlatev, which has been reported in other channels." Valentin Zlatev is also mentioned in the notorious cable, dedicated to organized crime in Bulgaria, sent by former US Ambassador, James Pardew: "LUKOIL’s representative in Bulgaria is VALENTIN ZLATEV... Lukoil's Bulgarian operations, through Zlatev, are suspected of strong ties to Russian intelligence and organized crime." The cable further reveals that Borisov makes discrete visits to the Russian Embassy, all while seeking recognition and public support from the US for his political ambitions. "16 (S/NF) Borisov's ego may provide our greatest leverage over him -- he craves international attention and particularly covets U.S. approval," the analyses from the report points out. The informal leader of GERB had been directly and openly bargaining with the Americans for their political support in the general elections as pay back for his pro-American positions. "I will bring down the government after the basing agreement is completed", was the directly proposed barter, which had impressed the Americans. The cable notes as example of controversy the fact that Borisov, on one hand side, had been promising the US full support for military bases and Bulgaria’s participation in international military missions, and on the other had dared to demagogically criticize in public the pro-American policies of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, BSP, in the following way: "On Iraq (the government) said that they would withdraw our troops immediately. They didn't withdraw them; they sent another brigade there. They gave the Americans bases without getting anything in return." Also of interest is the paragraph where Beyrle reports how after a written warning from the American side, Borisov immediately halted his anti-American rhetoric. To pretend he was loyal, he had promised to destroy the nationalist Ataka party. Nevertheless, the new Bulgarian political star remains a « street smart », « politically naïve » individual « His high energy level and short attention span sometimes lead him to pace like a caged tiger. ». The Ambassador does not spare Borisov the assessment of the latter’s extreme sensitivity and intolerance to any type of private or public criticism. One of the top egocentric weaknesses of the Prime Minister is self-promotion. The analyses in the cable even hints for a negative assessment: "Borisov promoted himself shamelessly as Chief Secretary, skillfully combining influential connections with media owners and Hollywood-perfect press instincts to ensure the favorable coverage that his image is built on". The cable notes the PM personally created a sound PR machine to polish his public image. Bulgarian journalists, however, in private conversations with Embassy employees, had not spared the truth of being subject to the “carrot and stick” method. Borisov paid cash to be glorified by the media or directly threatened the disobedient. As a whole, Borisov is assessed as the political leader, who may be capable of making good on his threat to bring down the ruling Three-Way Coalition. But, according to the same report, he remains "an unpredictable individual with unbridled political ambition." There is no doubt the Americans followed Beyrle’s advice to not forget who they are dealing with. And certainly, Borisov wishes that some details from his biography could remain buried in the diplomatic files forever. Batman on a leash? In one of the first cables, published by Wikileaks, Russian PM Putin was compared to Batman and President Medvedev to Robin. Boyko Borissov is also known by the nickname Batman, as the Americans reported. What is less known to Western media is his admiration for Putin, Hitler, Stalin and Mao, admiration he announced himself in a 2008 interview for the Bulgarian weekly Max The cable makes it clear that the Bulgarian Prime Minister is not as independent as the dictators he admires. He is in fact double-dependent. On one hand side, the US obviously dispose with compromising information about his past criminal activity and skillfully exploit the ego of the former firefighter. It looks like the Americans applied the good old principle : "they are all bastards, but he is our bastard", so they "push" Borissov, expecting him to remain loyal. On the other hand side, he is kept on a leash by "Regent" Zlatev, representative of Russian puppeteers, who whisper threats in Borisov’s ear. He admitted before the Americans the Russian threat of turning off the gas tap, but was it the only one? Or is there something personal? Because if Zlatev has "strong ties to Russian intelligence and organized crime", as reported in another cable from Sofia, one can deduct that what SIMO knows about Borisov was planned and directed to some extend by the Russian secret services. The conflict between Borisov’s dependencies is well on its way to be resolved in the following months. Borisov demonstrated a dramatic U-turn in his attitude towards Russian energy projects in Bulgaria, and particularly the “Belene” NPP project where, surprisingly, Valentin Zlatev became involved as a consultant from the Russian side. The positions of pro-American Ministers in the Borisov's cabinet such as Minister of Economics Traycho Traikov and Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov appear weakened lately, but Americans are yet to have the final say.http://www.crocmint.com/?id=2de9da

PROBING FACTS AND CIRCUMSTANCES EXPOSING BULGARIAN PRIME MINISTER, BOYKO BORISOV, OF CONNECTIONS WITH ORGANIZED CRIME AND PARTICIPATION IN MONEY LAUNDERING SCHEMES

Bulgarian Prime Minister's Dark Past Referred to EP Anti-Mafia Committee

To the Special Parliamentary Committee on Organized Crime, Corruption and Money Laundering at the European Parliament

REPORT

Regarding: Probing facts and circumstances exposing Bulgarian Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov, of connections with organized crime and participation in money laundering schemes.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The reason for this report is the accumulation of reliable and matching within the meaning of the published facts, data and documentary evidence of the participation in the past of Bulgarian Prime Minister, Mr. Boyko Borisov in an organized criminal group for illegal drug trafficking, suspicious fuel deals and money laundering. It is not even necessary to emphasize that this information is of great public interest for both Bulgaria and the European Union.

Before turning to you, we alerted the Bulgaria Prosecutor’s Office. Unfortunately, they rejected our request to examine in essence the provided data. Their superficial and unprofessional conclusion (see Annex 1) generates suspicions of political pressure to deny justice on this case. For this reason, we ask the respectable Committee, after carefully examining our motives, to initiate a probe and a public hearing of witnesses, including the Prime Minister of Bulgaria, Mr. Boyko Borisov. We list below the following data and evidence:

1. On May 26, 2011, the site WikiLeaks published a secret American diplomatic cable to Washington by the American Ambassador in Sofia, John Beyrle, on September 5, 2006. In it, Beyrle writes the following:

The Dirt

--------

¶13. (S/NF) Accusations in years past have linked Borisov to oil-siphoning scandals, illegal deals involving LUKoil and major traffic in methamphetamines. Information from SIMO tends to substantiate these allegations. Borisov is alleged to have used his former position as head of Bulgarian law enforcement to arrange cover for criminal deals, and his common-law wife, Tsvetelina Borislavova, manages a large Bulgarian bank that has been accused of laundering money for organized criminal groups, as well as for Borisov's own illegal transactions. Borisov is said to have close social and business ties to influential Mafia figures, including Mladen Mihalev (AKA "Madzho"), and is a former business partner of OC figure Roumen Nikolov (AKA "the Pasha").

http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/05/06SOFIA647.html

It is indicative that after the release of this information, which caused a public scandal, the Bulgarian Prime Minister did not specifically deny the allegations of his involvement in illegal activities. He said that he does not read "tabloids," and then redirected all questions to the US Ambassador in Sofia James Warlick. Ambassador Warlick did not disprove the authenticity of the published document, but expressed full support of the US government for the cabinet “Borisov.”

On May 30 2012, the online edition TAZ.de of the Berlin-based Tageszeitung published information about the codename SIMO, which, according to the media’s own investigative report, means CIA.http://taz.de/Diplomaten-Depeschen-von-Wikileaks/%2194296/ The article, signed by John Goetz, an investigative journalist with a long-running career with the globally popular Spiegel Magazine, insists that a former CIA Department Chief has confirmed that SIMO is the secret codename of the US Central Intelligence Agency, and that diplomats are banned from using the name of the agency in diplomatic documents.

“A former Head of the CIA, confirmed for TAZ that SIMO and the CIA are the same thing. SIMO is an administrative term for the CIA, actually used only for internal purposes, and as such, it should not have been used in the cables."

The same SIMO/CIA is mentioned in Ambassador John Beyrle’s cable as a source of information about Borisov’s involvement in “oil-siphoning scandals, illegal deals involving LUKoil and major traffic in methamphetamines.”

This news, published by Tageszeitung, confirms the seriousness of the data collected by the American Embassy and certainly cannot be dismissed as “tabloid” information or “rumors.”

Tageszeitung cites other cases where SIMO has been mentioned in American diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks. There are a total of 175 such mentions in 251 000 cables. It strikes that the latter are very rare and can be found only in reports with the highest classification level. It becomes clear that American diplomats cite SIMO/CIA only to confirm extremely sensitive information. It is also noteworthy that the only other politician listed by SIMO as being involved in drug trafficking is the former Senate President of Haiti, Mr. Joseph Lambert.

The information published by Tageszeitung was hushed by most mainstream media in Bulgaria – TV and radio channels and the press, which generates suspicions of political pressure to not make it public. On June 6 2012, at a hearing on media freedom in Bulgaria, organized by the ALDE group in the European Parliament, journalist Assen Yordanov presented a briefing on the publication and how it has been reported in Bulgarian media. (See Annex 2)

1. At a session of the Shumen District Court on November 25 2011, a defendant, Mr. Vasil Kostov AKA Ketsa (the Sneaker) claimed in a testimony that a meeting has been held in 1999 between organized crime bosses, where they have decided to buy a senior police post for Mr. Boyko Borisov so that he could protect them. Mr. Vasil Kostov offers further details such as Borisov having at the time a “brigade,” meaning an organized crime group for racket and other illegal activities.
2. At a session of the Belgrade District Court on April 7 2009 i.e. before the publication of the American diplomatic cable, Mr. Sreten Jocic nicknamed “Joca the Amsterdam,” indicted for murders and drug trafficking, stated that during his stay in Bulgaria, Mr. Boyko Borisov, in his capacity of Chief Secretary of the Interior, has provided cover-up for him.
3. On November 30 2010, at a session of the same Court in Belgrade, protected witness Tomislav Marjanovic also stated that Boyko Borisov has been “Sreten Jocic’s and Jocic’s right hand Slobodan Djurovic’s man in Bulgaria.”
4. Regarding information from Ambassador Beyrle’s cable about money laundering through the bank of Mr. Boyko Borisov’s girlfriend, Ms. Tsvetelina Borislavova, we note another secret diplomatic cable from Ambassador Beyrle from 2006 on the subject of Bulgarian bankshttp://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/12/06SOFIA1652.html. The cable lists several banks dealing with money laundering and granting loans to “connected” individuals. EIBank, then owned by Ms. Tsvetelina Borislavova, is among them:

“Economic and Investment Bank (former Bulgarian-Russian Investment Bank).  Offshore companies once owned this bank. Tsvetelina Borislavova, common-law wife of Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov, and Svetoslav Bozhilov own it now, together with Icelandic investor Thor Bjorgolfsson through his company Novator Finance Bulgaria.  The concern with this bank is that it is practicing connected lending with lower quality companies that wouldn't otherwise qualify.  There are also concerns about the origin of some of the assets Borissov allegedly passes through the bank.”

The source of the above information, listed as Dr. Vasil Kirov, at the time heading the Bulgarian Financial Intelligence Agency, is another important detail. Mr. Kirov is currently the Deputy Director of OLAF. This fact gives exceptional credibility to the released data.

Petition

We believe that the report of Ambassador Beyrle, referring to the globally-mighty Intelligence Service, incriminating Mr. Borisov over links to organized crime, trafficking of synthetic drugs and money laundering is a sufficient reason for the Committee to launch a probe in the matter.

However, we also note that the information, reported by Ambassador Beyrle and confirmed by SIMO, is further supported by witnesses with a known location, available to the justice system, who can be summoned by the Committee for a hearing.

Dear MEPs, members of the Committee,

The very fact that there is such shadow casted on the Prime Minister of EU Member State over the above listed suspicions, known publically and internationally, is scandalous and hurts the public image of the entire European Union. The case is fully within the authority and the competence of the Special Committee on organized crime.

We believe that the Committee’s probe will shed light on the mixing of interests of organized crime and senior officials and will send a political message to countries with the status of candidates for EU membership that not even the slightest suspicion of participation of public figures in organized crime, in corruption and in money laundering is going to be concealed.

For this reason we are asking the Committee to consider our report and to organize a public hearing with the following persons:

• Mr. Julian Assange, on the authenticity of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks
• Mr. John Goetz , investigative journalist on the CIA source who has confirmed the meaning of the codename SIMO
• Mr. Vasil Kirov, Deputy Chief of OLAF on the information that EIbank is involved in money laundering
• Mr. Sreten Jocic, defendant in a criminal case in Serbia, on his testimony before the Belgrade District Court
• Mr. Tomislav Marjanovic, protected witness in Serbia, on his testimony before the Belgrade District Court
• Mr. Vasil Kostov, defendant in a criminal case in Bulgaria, on his testimony before the Shumen District Court
• Mr. Rob Wainwright, Europol Director, on the existence of information about the Prime Minister’s criminal activities, received by partner services
• Mr. Boyko Borisov, Prime Minister of Bulgaria

We remain available for additional information and, as the authors of this report, we confirm our readiness to appear for a public hearing before the Committee.