Bulgarian crime. Where killing is a habit

Date: 29/10/05

The EU dream could die too

Bulgaria's Euro-credibility is dented by unsolved murders

SOME Balkan traditions, like murders in Bulgaria, die hard. On October 26th, Emil Kyulev, head of DZI-Rosexim, the country's top financial group, was shot dead as he drove to work in Sofia. The day before, the European Commission warned Bulgaria that unless it acted to curb crime in the next six months, it would not be able to join the European Union on time in January 2007.

The latest shooting was a ratcheting up of what officials in Sofia often dismiss as the "settling of accounts" by gangsters. It exacerbated the dim view taken in Brussels of Bulgaria's crime rate, and of the failure to convict any killers.

More than 50 Bulgarian mobsters have died in car-bombings and shoot-outs in Sofia and other cities in the past three years. The pace is accelerating, with eight murders in the past three months. One reason is that Bulgaria is a conduit between Turkey and Europe for trafficking in people and drugs.

A corrupt, inefficient judiciary is the biggest culprit. Police say any suspects they manage to arrest simply pay bribes to secure their release. Prosecutors and judges retort that police provide dodgy evidence. The process is snail-like; it can take nine years to get a case to court.

Sergey Stanishev, the 39-year-old Socialist prime minister whose coalition government desperately wants to meet its Euro-deadlines, admits that judicial corruption is his biggest problem. Chivvied by his cabinet, parliament finally pushed through a new criminal-procedures code, drawn up after consultations with Brussels, just hours before Olli Rehn, an EU commissioner, arrived in Sofia on October 14th. The new code meets many of his concerns. In an effort to clean house, more than 900 investigators will be demoted to pen-pushing jobs; and the pre-trial period in most cases will be cut to two months.

But it will take at least six months for the code to be implemented. New staff must be hired and trained. There is no guarantee they will be cleaner than their predecessors, or that judges will no longer be leaned on by politicians with links to the mob.

Mr Kyulev's killing differed from others in that he had apparently shaken off a shady past to become a high-flying banker and, among other things, financial adviser to the president, Georgi Parvanov. A policeman who studied business at Sofia University in the early transition years, Mr Kyulev belonged to a group of entrepreneurs who kept close to successive governments and did well in fuel and commodities trading. After surviving a banking collapse in the mid-1990s, he teamed up with Russian backers to found Roseximbank, then bought DZI, the state insurance agency, in a privatisation deal. Unless his killer is caught and punished quickly, the European Commission may well recommend, next spring, that Bulgaria wait another year before being admitted.

Bulgaria's Euro-credibility is dented by unsolved murders.