The Ministry of Innovation and Digital Transformation is actively working with the Ministry of Interior (MIA) and the State Agency “National Security“ in the last few weeks on a number of their investigations, said the Minister of Innovation and Digital Transformation Ivan Vassilev to bTV, quoted by BTA.
According to him, the information presented by the Minister of Interior Ivan Demerdzhiev, who stated that companies engaged in the supply of guardrails diverted funds to a “piggy bank company“, which in turn paid for flights for the Chairman of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms Delyan Peevski, is only the first of many investigations.
According to Vassilev, the information presented about the guardrails and Peevski's flights is based on an analysis of thousands of documents for many public orders. If the Ministry of Interior employees had to do it, it would have taken them months, but thanks to the SIGMA system, it happened in days, he emphasized.
The minister explained how the connections presented by Demerdzhiev were established.
In April 2022, the Road Infrastructure Agency (API) launched an order for guardrails on 6 separate positions worth over 253 million leva. Four associations and one company won the orders in question with bids that were at the estimated price of the RIA. After that, the contracts were indexed by 161 million leva, and thus the total value swelled to over 400 million leva. Two of the positions were won by one company without competition, two of the companies concluded a contract for different positions and are registered at the same address. They belong to a father and son. The wife of a municipal councilor from Pernik has shares in one of the companies that won these public awards. The head of the RIA in April 2022, before being appointed Chairman of the RIA Management Board, was the financial director of one of the companies that also participate in these mergers, and they receive 99.6 percent of the orders that the state gives for buffers, the minister said.
We have information about former and current politicians, we have information about orders that took place in the past, we are unraveling this oligarchy, Vassilev noted.
We are in the final stages of version 2 of SIGMA and there we see that there are ties from almost the entire political spectrum and this is the problem of our society - that political and economic interests are intertwined and we must stop this, he added.