site.btaCourt Returns to Prosecution Indictment in Case against Kiril Petkov, Bozhidar Bozhanov over Errors

At a hearing here on Tuesday, the Sofia City Court stopped the proceedings and returned to the prosecution the indictment in the case against Bozhidar Bozhanov, Co-chair of the Yes, Bulgaria party within the Democratic Bulgaria coalition, and Kiril Petkov, former chair of Continue the Change. In its ruling, the court states that the structure of the indictment is so complex and hypothetical that it leads to the conclusion that the prosecution lacks clarity regarding the charges against Bozhanov.

The ruling is appealable.

Petkov is charged with coercion against former minister of electronic governance Alexander Yolovski, and Bozhanov with a crime in office related to a public procurement contract.

According to the court, the indictment does not establish in whose favour Bozhanov committed the acts for which he is charged. One section of the indictment states that he attempted to create favourable conditions for a company to win a public procurement contract, but it is subsequently noted that the conditions he created benefited another company. Furthermore, the amount of the public procurement contract is not specified. It is also unclear which of Bozhanov’s actions threatened the country’s cybersecurity.

The presiding judge decided to revoke the pretrial detention measures imposed on the defendants - cash bonds of BGN 10,000 each.

According to Petkov’s defence attorney, Daniela Dokovska, the indictment contains substantial but remediable errors. She added that the case should be heard behind closed doors, as it involves classified information. Furthermore, in her view, there is no connection between the charges against Petkov and Bozhanov, and there is no reason for them to be consolidated into a single case. Dokovska explained that regarding Bozhanov’s charges, over 20 witnesses who have no connection to Petkov’s charges would need to be questioned. Furthermore, the classified information also pertains to Bozhanov’s charges. This violates Petkov’s right to a trial within a reasonable time in open court.

In response to Dokovska’s statement, Prosecutor Georgi Moysev said that at this time there is no basis for separating the two cases and no reason to believe that the case cannot be conducted within a reasonable time.

The team of prosecutors handling the case will decide, after reviewing the court’s reasoning in detail, whether to appeal, Prosecutor Marina Nenkova told the media after the hearing.

Prosecutor Moysev described the court’s ruling as “one opinion.”

According to Bozhanov, formally the prosecution is charging them, but if one checks which media outlets are covering this case, one can make a reasonable assumption as to who is “attacking” them. 

On March 28, 2025, the Sofia City Prosecution Office indicted then Continue the Change co-leader Kiril Petkov for allegedly attempting, on October 2, 2023, to coerce the then electronic governance minister Alexander Yolovski into consulting his predecessor Bozhidar Bozhanov about all dismissals of staff hired by Bozhanov, about all strategic matters and public procurement contract awards. Petkov also allegedly said Yolovski must hold weekly meetings with Bozhanov and all important decisions must be approved by him. Petkov allegedly threatened that unless Yolovski complied, there would be negative consequences for him, both professionally and personally.

On March 27, 2025, Bozhanov was indicted for abuse of office in connection with a public procurement contract while he was electronic governance minister in the Nikolay Denkov Cabinet (May - June 2022). The prosecution service argued that he had breached the Classified Information Protection Act and the established public procurement rules by allegedly providing the director of the Electronic Governance Infrastructure Executive Agency with a file on a memory stick containing a technical specification, and instructed that it should be used for a public procurement procedure worth nearly BGN 18 million. The technical specification was allegedly prepared in violation of the established information security procedures. According to the prosecution case, by doing so Bozhanov allegedly sought to secure a benefit for a particular company, and the offence was particularly serious because the act was committed by a government minister and it endangered the cybersecurity of the state administration.