Corruption has been exposed, now it's Radev's turn

Bulgaria's acting agriculture minister has spent recent months live-streaming police raids, reopening buried cases and filing complaints with EU prosecutors and investigators. Today, he handed over his duties to a new government and was removed from office.

Ivan Khristanov is confident that his work in the fight against corruption will outlive his term. Whether that will actually happen is now a question for Rumen Radev, the former president whose newly formed Progressive Bulgaria party won an absolute parliamentary majority in the April 19 elections after promising to dismantle what he called Bulgaria’s “oligarchic model of governance.” It is the same machinery that Khristanov documented during his short term in office.

The cases initiated by Hristanov are the first test for Radev.

“I have combined two roles in myself,” Khristanov told Politiko. “The first is the role of a minister. The second is the role of a whistleblower. They can cut me off from the government. But my role as a whistleblower will live on long after that.”

Bulgaria, along with Hungary, is ranked worst in the EU in Transparency International's latest corruption index. EU funds, the country's largest source of public investment, have been the subject of hundreds of fraud investigations in recent years, involving shell farms, inflated contracts and politically connected intermediaries.

Khristanov was appointed in February to a caretaker government led by Prime Minister Andrei Gjurov, formed after the previous government fell in December amid the biggest anti-corruption protests in Bulgaria in decades. Such caretaker governments, of which the country has had ten in five years, usually have a narrowly defined role of interim governance and organizing elections. This one has also tackled corruption.

During a recent Webex conversation with Politika, a follow-up to an earlier interview, Khristanov spent the first five minutes adjusting his suit, straightening his tie, and arranging papers, as if it were a television broadcast rather than a conversation with a journalist. For a man who has turned his short tenure into a live broadcast of corruption investigations, garnering, by his own count, more than 70 million views on Facebook, the distinction between the two has faded.

The machinery of gaze aversion

He published his discoveries one after another, at the pace of a man trying to keep up with a clock he cannot stop. Two state irrigation tenders, worth 169 million euros in EU funds, with construction costs he said were inflated more than 20 times - work that should have cost around 43.000 euros - were invoiced at one million euros.

Hristanov first reported the alleged cattle burning fraud as a deputy minister in 2022, only to discover upon his return to office that every trace of his original report, electronic and paper, had been erased from the records of four agricultural and food safety agencies.

The factory alleged to be producing the contaminated meat that was reaching schools was owned by the wife of party lawmaker Delyan Peevski, a media oligarch who was sanctioned by the US for corruption under the Global Magnitsky Act. Peevski said the sanctions were unacceptable and that he had not participated in any corrupt activities.

The Bulgarian prosecutor's office is where such cases went to die.

“The lack of any further action by the Bulgarian prosecutor’s office remains the main bottleneck,” said Ruslan Stefanov, chief economist at the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia. EU institutions and civil society organizations have long documented the same pattern. Investigations stall. Cases are dropped. Few reach court.

“A place where rich people go with escort girls”

Then Khristanov moved on to the ski lodge.

High on Mount Vitosha, on the forested outskirts of Sofia, sits a building that Hristanov estimated at 10 million euros. It has panoramic views, 20 rooms, a ski lift 100 meters away and a surrounding park maintained at state expense.

The facility is owned by the Ministry of Agriculture. The previous administration agreed to sell it to a company linked to Bulgarian businessman Rumen Gajtanski for 500.000 euros. The contract had been signed, but the sale had not yet been completed when Khristanov took office. Gajtanski, known in local media as “Vuk,” has been in custody since August 2024 on separate embezzlement charges related to a loan granted by the state-owned Bulgarian Development Bank to one of his companies. He has pleaded not guilty in that case.

For 500.000 euros, Khristanov said, one could perhaps buy an “average” apartment in the center of Sofia. He went to see the house in person, with a camera on, and the footage was posted on Facebook the same day.

“It’s like one of those places where rich guys go with escort girls,” he said, his composure giving way to something between disbelief and indignation. “Literally, I’m not kidding. Expensive furniture, but at the same time, you know, it’s like six apartments. With huge beds.”

The video has been viewed more than 600.000 times on Facebook, and according to Khristanov, significantly more than a million times if other channels are included. His ministry has blocked the sale of the property and proposed that the ski lodge be transferred to the Ministry of Education for use by schoolchildren. Khristanov said the buyer is seeking one million euros in damages. Gajtanski's lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.

Radev cannot afford earthquakes

Radev, who resigned as president in January to run in the election, won almost 45 percent of the vote.

His victory prompted the immediate resignation of acting Prosecutor General Borislav Sarafov. Reform advocates and opposition lawmakers have accused Sarafov for years of protecting certain figures, including three-time Prime Minister Boyko Borisov and Peevsky, a media magnate under sanctions. In a resignation statement, Sarafov said he had made the decision “some time ago” and had delayed it so as not to destabilize the prosecutor’s office. He did not address the allegations.

The new parliament now has the qualified majority needed to reform the Supreme Judicial Council and appoint a new chief prosecutor, a reform that the EU has long insisted on.

The fight against corruption was a central theme of Radev's campaign, and on election day he told reporters that Bulgaria had “a historic chance to break once and for all with the oligarchic Peevski-Borisov model.” Sarof's resignation provided him with the first step in fulfilling that promise.

Brussels welcomed the result. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa rushed to congratulate him, hailing Bulgaria as a “proud member of the European family.” This was done despite concerns in Brussels itself about Radev’s previous leniency towards Russia.

Analysts in Bulgaria and abroad were more cautious. Radev assembled Progressive Bulgaria from a network of former ministers he appointed during his presidency, members of his presidential administration, and politicians who had defected from the now-defunct Bulgarian Socialist Party. He won by appealing to eurosceptic voters, eurozone skeptics, and pro-Moscow Bulgarians. The party has been described as an ideologically incoherent base in need of an issue on which everyone can agree.

“Fighting corruption is a logical common denominator,” said Maria Simeonova of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Sofia. But the same calculus that makes that common denominator necessary makes in-depth enforcement of the law risky. Governance involves alliances and a caucus full of new MPs who will expect to be rewarded with appointments, state contracts and regional patronage, she said.

Even Sarafov’s resignation seems to some analysts more like a show than the beginning of a larger change: it is visible and attracts attention, but it does not mark the beginning of a fundamental shift. Sarafov stepped down, said Emilia Zankina of Temple University in Rome, an expert on Bulgarian politics, because he “expected Radev to come after him.”

She said Radev could make a few moves that would attract public attention, but not much more than that. The coalition logic that requires anti-corruption rhetoric to retain his base, in her view, also means that Radev cannot afford the upheavals that would come from pursuing that fight too deeply.

“Some people may change here and there, but the Peevski–Borisov model will simply be replaced by Radev’s one-man rule model.”

Minister without a seat in parliament

Khristanov founded his anti-corruption movement Edinenie (Unity) in 2023. In January, the movement joined three smaller parties to form the Anti-Corruption Bloc, which participated in the April 19 elections.

The bloc did not win the minimum four percent of the vote needed to enter parliament, and Khristanov was not on the electoral list. This, he explained, was his decision so that the technical government would remain “equally distant from all political parties.” Voters could not connect what they saw on Facebook with the name on the ballot. When asked if he trusted Radev, Khristanov avoided a direct answer.

"Every new government should get its 100 days. Let's give them that credit of confidence, and we'll see."

And after 100 days? "If they're good, they're good. If they're bad, then we strike."

Prepared by: NB