Specialised Criminal Court held a sitting on Corpbank Siphoning Off Trial

The trial on the collapse of the Corporate Commercial Bank (CCB) in Bulgaria is expected to move forward and begin examination of evidence. The reading of the indictment came to an end on 5^th of February as the Specialised Criminal Court decided to take advantage of the amendments made to the Penal Procedure Code, which eliminated the legal requirement for the operative part of the indictment to be read by prosecutors at the start of each trial and replaced it with a brief summary report drafted by the court itself.

The reading was curtailed nearly 9 months after it started. The operative part of the indictment consists of nearly 5,000 pages and prosecutors had not finished reading that part yet. They have managed to read almost half of it.

The dispute on how the trial should proceed went on for nearly two hours, because all the defence lawyers insisted that the reading continue under the old procedural rules.

Ivan Geshev, Deputy chief Prosecutor: “The prosecution is not afraid of the substance of the CCB trial, we are not concerned by the evidence we have collected in the pre-trial phase. We are not afraid of the expert assessments and our work. They (defendants) are doing everything possible to delay the trial. Probably, they are counting on extra-legal solutions, like the change in political circumstances or officials,” he said.

Konstantin Simeonov, lawyer: “The only thing we want is to observe the law. In this case, it was violated. This is a political process. Things are ready in advance and all that we have talked about in the court room today is just for… general knowledge.”

Corporate Commercial Bank, Bulgaria’s fourth-largest lender by assets at the time, was placed under special supervision of the Bulgarian National Bank on June 20, 2014, following a bank run. On 6th of November, 2014, the BNB Governing Council revoked CCB’s banking license.

The indictment for the siphoning off of Corporate Commercial Bank was filed by the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office on 20 July, 2018. All copies of the indictment include more than 210,000 pages. 18 people have been indicted. The charges pressed against them exceed 5,000 pages.

The former majority shareholder of Corporate Commercial Bank Tzvetan Vassilev and the former deputy governor of Bulgaria’s central bank (BNB), Tzvetan Gounev, are among the indicted.

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