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Corruption-riddled Bulgaria, Volume 1, presented tonight

It is a major and ambitious project. “I can understand a display of healthy scepticism at hearing such a title, seeing as the media have been swamping us with corruption scandals, making it very difficult for readers to get to the bottom of them all and know which are true and which – not quite,” said historian Momchil Metodiev for the Bulgarian National Radio before tonight’s presentation of volume 1 of “Corruption-riddled Bulgaria” by Edvin Sugarev, Hristo Hristov and Petar Buchkov. The book is an in-depth study, with the first volume covering the period from the time the State Security companies were created in the country to the 1996 bankruptcy of Bulgaria and the hyper-inflation, says Momchil Metodiev, publishers’ reader, and adds:

“One of the theses the authors put forth, and it made a big impression on me, was that corruption does not date back to the beginning of the period of transition. In fact it has existed since the end of communism, with the infrastructure created at the end of communism starting to develop and grow to become an ever bigger problem in the time of transition. This is a very profound study, based on the relevant archive sources which have been published; some of them have been included in the book, others are available on a separate website for public scrutiny. It is a study anyone can turn to at any given moment. Especially for this period, a period that is so eventful,” says historian Momchil Metodiev.

The foreword reads that the “briefcases” (of money) do exist, though probably not as briefcases full of cash, but in the form of different kinds of bonuses and opportunities which certain groups, in close association with the communist party elite and State Security at the time, were able to exploit. From then on, this first volume covers all major corruption affairs which many still remember, starting with the International Aid Agency affair, the Sapio foundation, the foreign debt. “There is a bulky portion of the book dedicated to the so-called “gangster times”, with Multigroup, the gang wars, the Yugo-embargo,” the historian adds.

Editor: Radoslav Dikov

English version: Milena Daynova




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