Corruption in the highest places

In the past few days Bulgarian media have published an internal report by OLAF, the European Commission's anti-fraud office, on the embezzlement of funds in Bulgaria. It confirms rumours that the election campaign of President Georgi Parvanov was financed by dubious businessmen: "In the year 1999 Hillary Clinton refused to accept a 1,000-dollar cheque from the widow of Bulgarian mafia boss Iliya Pavlov. Parvanov, on the other hand, received 25,000 euros from the notorious businessman Ludmil Stoykov in 2006 and never gave back a single euro, neither when the SAPARD scandal [the freezing of EU subsidies] became public nor when the state prosecution charged Stoykov with money laundering. And even now that the OLAF report has been made public and it says in black and white that Stoykov belongs to an international criminal network, the presidency remains silent."

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