Ministry of Interior re-submitted the draft indictment warrants for former PM Borissov, former finance minister Goranov and GERB PR officer Arnaudova

The Ministry of Interior on March 21 submitted to the Prosecutor's Office draft indictments for pressing charges against former PM Boyko Borissov, former finance minister Vladislav Goranov and GERB PR officer Sevdelina Arnaudova, for extortion.

MoI says the documents were also in the investigation materials submitted on Friday, but described in the cover letter, not in the records of the volumes of evidence collected.

The Prosecutor's Office said at the time that police investigators had not asked for Borissov, Goranov and Arnaudova to be charged.

At an extraordinary briefing on Friday evening, Prime Minister Kiril Petkov and Minister of Interior Boyko Rashkov said the Prosecutor's Office was carrying out serious sabotage of the investigation.

The Sofia City Court is also due to rule today on whether or not to approve the search protocols at the homes of Boyko Borissov, Vladislav Goranov and Sevdelina Arnaudova, as these actions were carried out "under urgency", without prior court authorisation.

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Lawyer Menko Menkov told BNT on Saturday that Boyko Borissov and Sevdelina Arnaudova have not been charged in any case.

In his words, there can be no question of sabotage on the part of the Prosecutor's Office, and the Ministry of Interior acted unlawfully by sending an investigating police officer rather than an investigator to question Prime Minister Petkov on the case.

"All the actions of the Ministry of Interior so far are absolutely unlawful. The pre-trial proceedings were initiated with the first investigative action on 17 March - the day Mr Borissov and the other two were detained. In the first investigative action, as required by law, Prime Minister Kiril Petkov was questioned. It would have been better if this thing had been done by an investigator," the lawyer explained.

No evidence has been provided to lawyer Menko Menkov so far, he said and added that he was not aware of any having been collected or submitted to the Prosecutor's Office.

"In this case, the European Public Prosecutor's Office has absolutely nothing to do, because it has no powers to investigate this kind of crimes, according to the regulation of the visibility and the Criminal Procedure Code. The only evidence is that Mr Petkov stated in his testimony that he had informed Ms Kövesi the day before about these actions," Menkov said.

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