SOFIA (Bulgaria), May 11 (SeeNews) – A decision by a Bulgarian court to acquit one of Alfa Finance Holding’s major shareholders, three employees of its unit Bulbrokers and two ex- government ministers in a case for the sale of a stake in power utility EVN Bulgaria Elektrorazpredelenie has entered into force, Alfa Finance Holding said on Tuesday.
The prosecutor's office decided not to appeal the Appellate Specialised Criminal Court's decision within the 15-day deadline which expired on May 5, Alfa Finance Holding said in a statement.
In its decision, the appellate court upheld the decision of the first instance court, saying that the sale of the remaining state-owned stake of 33% in the power utility majority owned by Austrian energy group EVN, had not caused damages to the state and the actions of the six defendants cannot be classified as crimes.
"We went through an absolutely unnecessary court case, which did not seek justice but rather sought to exert pressure in order to suppress the public activity of several public figures. In my case it is a matter of pressure on the critical position of Capital and Dnevnik towards those in power," Ivo Prokopiev, a major shareholder in Alfa Finance Holding and founder and owner of Economedia group - the publisher of newspapers Capital and Dnevnik, said in the statement.
Last month, Prokopiev was acquitted on all counts in another high-profile case. The Sofia Appellate Court issued a final decision dropping the charges of transformation of illegally acquired property brought against Prokopiev and two other Alfa Finance major shareholders. The court found that no crime had been committed related to their involvement as board members of Alfa Finance in the sale of shares in Kaolin on the stock exchange in Sofia in 2000.
The EVN privatisation case was launched in 2017 against Prokopiev, former finance minister Simeon Dyankov, former economy and energy minister Traycho Traykov, and three employees of local investment intermediary Bulbrokers.
The 33% stake in EVN Bulgaria Elektrorazpredelenie was privatised in 2011 for over 90 million levs ($56 million/46 million euro) through the sale of the shares on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange.
“This harassment is finally over,” Dyankov said, adding the court case had been a waste of time and state money and a nerve-wracking experience. “Hopefully, lessons will be learnt about the rule of law,” he added, as quoted in the statement.
“After over four years of harassment even the prosecutor’s office stopped claiming that black is white,” Traykov said in a Facebook post. The prosecutors accepted the decision of the court that the defendants had complied fully with the law in their actions, Traykov went on to say. Through the deal, the state had sold its shares in EVN Bulgaria Elektrorazpredelenie at a price above their fair value, he added.
The EVN case has garnered widespread international attention about judicial arbitrariness and growing institutional pressure on independent media in Bulgaria, a country that has been repeatedly slammed by international observers and institutions for its politically driven prosecution and deteriorating media freedom. Concerns that the legal proceedings were politically motivated and related to Economedia's critical stance towards the government have been expressed by representatives of media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Association of European Journalists, the biggest global media association WAN-IFRA and the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, among others.
Earlier this year, RSF issued ten concrete recommendations on how to address the dire press freedom situation in Bulgaria. These included protecting the media from judicial harassment in the form of arbitrary lawsuits or criminalisation of their work, for example by increasing the transparency and accountability of law-enforcement procedures targeting journalists, media owners and managers, and asking the European Commission to propose legislation establishing European-wide minimal standards of protection by introducing procedural guarantees for the victims of Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) and by combining preventive measures to block abusive lawsuits.