Bulgaria: Convictions Matter

From The Financial Times

By Kerin Hope

East European states keen to improve their credential in battling corruption are constantly promising to re-double their efforts. New laws are passed, new investigative units established and new officials appointed to fight the good fight.

But all struggle to deliver what really matters – high-level convictions. So, all eyes are now on Bulgaria where Alexander Tomov, a former deputy prime minister and one-time boss of CSKA, a leading Sofia football club, was this week found guilty of fraud. Could this be a defining moment?

Tomov was sentenced to nine years in jail on Wednesday by a Sofia city court for selling off plots of land owned by Kremikovtzi, a collapsing steel producer, at well below the market price.

He was also found guilty of embezzling €7.5m while serving as the company's chief executive after it was taken over by Global Steel Holdings, controlled by Pramod Mittal – a younger brother of the Indian steel billionaire Lakshmi Mittal.

Tomov is the first senior Bulgarian politician to be sentenced on corruption charges. Yet he will remain free pending appeal – a process that could last years under the country's slow-moving judicial system.

Some observers in Sofia claim he was an easy target – a discredited player from the 1990s who became deeply unpopular with ordinary Bulgarians after CSKA was banned from European competition under his management.

"
Tomov had been on the periphery of politics for a long time....He wasn't a big fish,"
said Ognian Shentov, head of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, a Sofia thinktank.

Bulgaria may be a European Union member (since 2007), but its reputation in western Europe for being soft on corruption is unlikely to change until the Sofia courts convict somebody more important. The Tomov verdict is only a start.