Corpbank Siphoning Off Trial Fails to Start

The specialized criminal court on 13^th of December failed to proceed with the case of the Corporate Commercial Bank (Corpbank) siphoning off. The indictment is against the main shareholder Tzvetan Vassilev and 17 other people suspected in the Corpbank collapse, including senior officials from the Bulgarian National Bank and Corpbank, auditors, accountants and bank cashiers.

In mid-November, the court sent a request for legal assistance to Serbia for Vassilev's summoning. However, no answer has been received yet. The investigation was conducted in the absence of Corpbank majority shareholder, and for three years there has been no decision by the Serbian court on the request for extradition. However, the court again makes efforts to summon him regularly and to hand the indictment.

The case is unique in its kind. The size of collected evidence is 1,000 volumes. More than 400 witnesses have been interviewed. The indictment in all its copies is over 210,000 pages. In the 10,000 page indictment, the “Corpbank model" is described as the biggest economic and public "financial fraud" in the country’s new history. However, according to defendants and defense, the perpetrators are not in the court room.