A Bulgarian court issued a European arrest warrant for Stoyan Mavrodiev, the former head of the state-owned Bulgarian Development Bank (BDB), according to Euractiv.
Mavrodiev has been missing since 22 August, when he was reported missing in Bulgaria. He faces charges of serious embezzlement of public €75m in connection with a loan provided by BDB to Roadway Construction.
This is a crime punishable by effective imprisonment. Furthermore, there is a risk that the banker will abscond or commit another crime.
The company is owned by Bulgarian businessman Rumen Gaitansky, nicknamed Vulka (the Wolf), but the investigation has taken a political backlash. The loan money was not repaid, and the state bank returned only a small portion of it.
Gaitansky was released on €125,000 bail in October after two months in custody, but Mavrodiev is still missing.
Mavrodiev was one of the authors of the first economic programme of the GERB party when its leader Boyko Borissov first won the elections and was elected Prime Minister in 2009. In the same year, Mavrodiev was elected as a GERB deputy and later appointed chairman of the Financial Supervision Commission.
During Mavrodiev’s rule, the state-owned bank issued loans worth around 500 million euros, which Kiril Petkov, former economy minister and former prime minister, later labelled suspicious. Petkov linked the loans to the interests of MRF-New Beginning leader Delyan Peevski, but there is no direct evidence of this.
However, investigators note that about 15 million euros of the money loaned by the state bank eventually went to MRF founder Ahmed Dogan, Peevski’s main political opponent.
