Three suspected crime bosses in custody and awaiting trial are planning to stand in a Bulgarian election in July that could give them parliamentary seats and immunity from prosecution.
Bulgaria, which joined the EU in 2007, is under growing pressure from Brussels to crack down on organized crime.
The Socialist-led government has also been hit by a wave of protests against economic hardship and corruption.
Plamen Galev, arrested with his business partner in January on charges of racketeering and running an organized crime group, plans to run in the July 5 vote as an independent candidate in the southwestern town of Dupnitsa, his lawyer said on Tuesday.
Local council officials said that Galev and his partner Angel Hristov effectively ran Dupnitsa for years through contacts in the police, courts and tax authorities.
They have come to symbolize a climate of impunity in the Balkan country since the collapse of communism 20 years ago.
Father and son Veselin and Hristo Danov, in custody since September on charges of extortion, money laundering and luring people into prostitution, will also run for parliament in the Black Sea city of Varna on the ticket of a local party.
Electoral Commission officials said there were no legal grounds to bar the three from the election.
Bulgaria has so far failed to convict a single senior official of corruption and has sent to jail just one crime boss since the fall of communism in 1989.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema