Sofia Prosecutor's Office launched an investigation against the former head of Bulgaria's National Road Infrastructure Fund (NRIF), Vesselin Georgiev, for alleged malfeasance in office, chief Sofia prosecutor Nikolai Kokinov said on May 15, as quoted by Dnevnik daily.

The probe was launched a day after the National Audit Office made public a report, detailing extensive flaws in the operations of NRIF and its institutional predecessor, the Executive Agency Roads, over the period from January 1 2006 to June 30 2007.

The audit showed that the fund breached regulations in awarding public contracts, which cost the budget more than 100 million leva, Dnevnik quoted Kokinov as saying. No charges have been pressed yet, he added.

Georgiev resigned as head of NRIF in February, a month after a report in Bulgarian weekly Kapital claimed that he awarded contracts worth 120 million leva to Binder, a firm in which his brother was a director.

The probe will have to determine whether there was any "criminal conflict of interest", Kokinov said.

An earlier internal investigation by the Finance Ministry concluded that “based on the results of the investigation, one can conclude that Vesselin Georgiev could have found himself in a situation in which a conflict of interest would arise or manifest itself”.

The row caused the European Commission to ask Bulgaria to suspend all European Union funding to the NRIF pending the outcome of an investigation. It was the first in a series of controversies that have prompted the EC to freeze funding under all pre-accession aid programmes based on suspicions that the money was misused.