Regarding the “Institutional position in connection with political attacks against the Bulgarian and European Prosecutor's Office“, published today on the departmental website of the Prosecutor's Office of the Republic of Bulgaria, the Minister of Justice Andrey Yankulov finds it necessary to state the following:
“First of all, I admire the transparency demonstrated by the leadership of the Prosecutor's Office of the Republic of Bulgaria to share information about the existence of an investigation of extremely high public interest, concerning the parallel justice network “The Eight Dwarfs“ and the alleged corrupt involvement in it of a high-ranking magistrate from the judicial system of the European Union, including a retelling of the testimonies of three witnesses from the case.
I appeal to the leadership of the Prosecutor's Office of the Republic of Bulgaria to demonstrate the same standard of transparency with regard to witness testimonies and other evidentiary materials from all investigations of the “Eight Dwarfs“ network, concerning all other high-ranking magistrates, including administrative heads of key prosecutor's offices.
However, it is striking that essential circumstances such as the number of the criminal proceedings, the name of the supervising prosecutor, some of the dates of the relevant communication and the status of the investigation at the present time are hidden.
The materials themselves contain extremely disturbing facts regarding the investigation of extremely high public interest.
In the published report by a prosecutor from the Sofia City Prosecutor's Office (SGP), sent on June 3, 2025 to the European Chief Prosecutor Ms. Laura Kövesi from the then Acting Chief Prosecutor Borislav Sarafov, contains the statement: “At the present time, from the interrogations conducted so far, there is evidence substantiating the existence of a reasonable assumption of the involvement of Ms. Teodora Georgieva in the criminal act aimed at generating certain financial benefits in an unlawful manner, accepting unregulated sums of money in the amount of 10,000 BGN, as a “guest” Petrov on the 25th of each month from 2019 to 2020“
In this written statement sent to the attention of the European Chief Prosecutor, it remains completely unclear why the person for whom it is alleged that there was a reasonable suspicion of a corruption crime committed as early as June 2025 has not yet been brought as a defendant?
Why then is the evidence in question being collected, since it is not used for its intended purpose in the criminal process to engage in criminal liability, given that it points to a conclusion of authorship of a crime and this conclusion is explicitly shared with the European Chief Prosecutor? The extremely worrying impression remains that such types of criminal proceedings are used for other purposes, such as defamation, intimidation, discrediting, etc.
The published materials by the leadership of the Prosecutor's Office of the Republic of Bulgaria actually support my thesis about the urgent need for a qualitative change in the management of the said institution in the interest of justice“.