site.btaVazrazhdane Questions Why No One Has Been Convicted over Illegal Construction in Baba Alino

In a declaration from the parliamentary rostrum on Wednesday, MP Kosta Stoyanov of Vazrazhdane said that a year had passed since the illegal construction in Baba Alino was confirmed, yet to this day not a single person was convicted over what happened there.

"I want to ask what current President Iliana Iotova has done on the case, what presidential candidate Andrey Gurov has done, and what Rumen Radev has accomplished during his nearly 10 years in the country's top positions as president and now prime minister. The answer is: nothing," Stoyanov said.

The Baba Alino case first came to public attention following investigations by the anti-corruption platform BIRD and reports from local activists, who raised concerns about extensive construction activity on forest land near the Golden Sands resort. The controversy centres on 104 residential buildings erected across approximately 10 hectares in the Baba Alino area in Varna, allegedly without valid permits and with the apparent failure - or possible complicity - of several institutions responsible for oversight. 

Presenting Vazrazhdane's decaration, Stoyanov also said: "When we talk about 104 illegal structures, we need to realize that they did not appear overnight. This is not a case of an illegal construction that someone managed to build before the relevant institutions detected it. We are talking about large-scale construction, structures entered in the cadastral register, documents, transactions and people who paid substantial sums for properties."

Stoyanov added: "From the very beginning, Vazrazhdane has maintained that Baba Alino cannot simply be treated as a case of illegal construction carried out by a single investor. The scale of the violations, the lack of response and attempts to cover them up indicate the involvement of an entire chain of individuals in this scandal, including municipal and state officials, lawyers, notaries, and even politicians and MPs. We want to know whether there are officials who violated the law and, if so, why, a year later, we still see no results from the actions of law enforcement authorities."

The institutions cannot claim that they did not have information, the MP went on to say. "The case was discussed by the Parliament's Committee for Oversight of the Security Services, while according to the information available to us, the activities of the Ukrainian group KYB were described in reports by the State Agency for National Security. Therefore, no one holding a senior state position today can claim that they knew nothing. You knew, but you did nothing."

"We continue to ask whether there is a political umbrella over the Ukrainian group and Oleg Nevzorov and, if so, where it comes from. Why, given so many established facts and serious questions, does this person continue to operate freely in Bulgaria?" Stoyanov said.

Vazrazhdane will work to ensure that the Baba Alino case is not forgotten. "We will monitor the actions of the municipality, institutions and the prosecution service, and will insist that all illegal structures be removed in accordance with the procedure provided by law," the MP said.