Corruption Charges Pressed against 10 Officials from Automobile Administration

Ten of the detained officials from the Automobile Administration agency in Blagoevgrad are charged with corruption and remain in custody for 72 hours. Among them is the brother of the Chief Secretary of the Ministry of Transport and the husband of a prosecutor at the specialized prosecutor's office.

According to the prosecution, the detainees have blackmailed transport companies from the region: inspectors from the agency checked them and found serious violations, which are supposed to be sanctioned by fines of up to 5,000 BGN.

For a bribe of about EUR 300, however, the automobile administration officials would write that the violations were not so serious and fined the companies with about BGN 200. Under this scheme, the officials from a shift received 1,200 euros a day. The money arrived in envelopes at their workplaces with the documentation of the inspected companies.

Daniela Nacheva, Deputy Head of the Specialized Prosecutor's Office expains that this way, these inspectors, on the one hand, reported lots of activities on inspecting these companies and, on the other hand, the serious violations by these companies were concealed. For doing this, the officials were ”rewarded” with bribes.

Ivaylo Spiridonov, Director of the Directorate for Combating Organized Crime: We used the whole set of Special Intelligence Devices on this case, which allowed us to find out about the bribing and allocation of the money from the bribes among the officials.