Sat, Feb 04 2012

Banker case resumes

Thu, Nov 08 2001 13:00 CET

byIvan Vatahov

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The Sofia City Court proceeded Tuesday with the case against the seven-member former board of directors of the bankrupt Mineralbank.

Roumen Kasabov, Emil Hursev, Vladimir Tashkov, Kiril Nikolov, Assen Zapryanov, Petko Pramatarov, and Zhivko Stoimenov were accused of criminal breach of trust, which holds a punishment of three to 10 years in prison under the Penal Code.

The members of the board of directors are charged with siphoning more than three billion old leva (three million in today's leva) from Mineralbank between August 1994 and May 1996. Former prosecutor general Ivan Tatarchev submitted the indictment to court in 1997.

One of the accused, Hursev, said the evidence against him was "complete nonsense." He expected to be acquitted on November 8 when the lawsuit will be finalized.

Mineralbank was established in 1980 with the core business of extending state credits to large industrial enterprises. Later, the company was renamed the Bank for Business Incentive Mineralbank. In 1996, it was declared insolvent, together with several other Bulgarian banks. Earlier this year Roseximbank bought Mineralbank for one lev and assumed its 20.5 million leva debts.

On June 18, the court session had to be postponed, since one of the defendents, Nikolov, did not show up because of illness. At that session, the court required all the decisions and acts of the then Council of Ministers on the restructuring of Mineralbank's debts to be submitted, together with the lists of debtors of the Plama refinery and the Nova Plama company, as well as court rulings on their bankruptcies.

The jury asked for a copy of file 72 from 1996 which ruled Mineralbank insolvent. It had to be accompanied by a statement on how the court had made the decision to rule the bank insolvent.

The judge also ordered that the former executive director of the bankrupt Bank for Agricultural Credit, Veska Medjidieva, be brought to court to testify. She allegedly received a credit from Mineralbank for one of her companies on March 10, 1993. Medjidie-va has fled to South Africa.

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