Documents from the Pandora Papers reveal that the majority shareholders in Bulgaria’s First Investment Bank (FIB) Tseko Minev and Ivaylo Mutafchiev are the ultimte beneficiaries of offshore companies, which have received over BGN 1 billion in loans from the Bank. In an attempt to shrink the problematic exposures, the Bank’s management forces businessmen to draw cessions that are uncollectible. Then the businessmen are attacked by the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office, and eventually their property is bought for pocket change by Alexander Angelov, the attorney of infamous former lawmaker and media tycoon Delyan Peevski and Angelov’s close associate Georgi Samuilov.

“Bad Apple”

FIB was rescued three times by injections of State money through an increase of its capital by the Bulgarian Development Bank (BDB) – during the term of the Three-Party Coalition cabinet (2005 – 2009), after the collapse of Corporate Commercial Bank (CCB) and most recently after it failed the European Central Bank (ECB) stress test. A report by the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB, Bulgaria’s central bank) Supervision from 2012 lists the reasons for this instability – over the years, the Bank has granted huge loans to a small number of related parties.  Loans to offshore companies related to its majority holders constitute the largest share of FIB’s biggest exposures, but also include loans to companies related to notorious oligarchs such as Hristo Kovachki, who is the best man of Ivaylo Mutafchiev, and Grisha Ganchev. BNB inspectors found that a large percentage of these loans were either non-performing and bad loans.

The practice of using account holders’ money to lend to bankers own businesses was also mentioned by former US Ambassador to Bulgarian John Beyrle in a classified diplomatic cable from 2005, published by Wikileaks. It says that several Bulgarian banks, including FIB, are involved in money laundering and connected lending.

…The major problems in the Bulgarian banking system include money laundering by Bulgarian and foreign criminals and connected lending. A previous concern, non-transparent ownership, has been largely addressed through legislation limiting the numerous offshore companies registered as bank shareholders and consolidating the banks’ ownership structure. Connected lending continues to be a problem among some banks as their owners funnel money to related – less competitive – companies, with no intention of repaying. This leaves legitimate investors and account-holders holding the bag when bad loans go uncollected..

According to the cable, “the Central Bank and government authorities are aware of these banks, and claim to be trying to clean them up” but it is a difficult task due to political interference. Beyrle describes these banks as “bad apples”. “FIB is now considered to have one foot in the legitimate retail world (it is known as one of the most aggressive and “polished” banks) as well as one in the murkier criminal realm,” he writes.

Who Georgios Georgiou really is

In 2014, Bivol published an investigation into FIB’s loan portfolio, which revealed that a Cypriot citizen named Georgios Georgiou had been granted loans from the Bank worth over BGN 1.2 billion (see the table at the end of the publication). Georgius was the ultimate owner of Yulen AD, Vitosha Ski, the OK Supertrans taxi cab company, the companies behind the defunct steel mill Kremikovtzi, the Bulmarket company whose train caused an explosion with fatalities in the northeastern village of Hitrino and a number of other businesses. The mysterious Cypriot national turned out to be the biggest foreign investor in Bulgaria.

Now, the Pandora Papers indisputably show who is behind Georgios Georgiou. The information is found in the correspondence between the registrar of offshore companies Trident Trust and the Cypriot legal office G. Papadopoulos & Co. In it, Trident Trust wants to get detailed information about the real owners of all companies in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) that are registered as customers of their Cypriot counterparty. This became necessary due to a change in the BVI legislation, which mandates companies to maintain a register of beneficial owners.

The documents clearly show that Georgiou and other proxies were entered by Papadopoulos & Co as formal holders of the offshore shares, but the actual beneficiaries are the majority shareholders in FIB – Tseko Minev and Ivaylo Mutafchiev.

The documents of Trident Trust, the registering company, designate Georgiou as a shareholder

In other words, there is now indisputable evidence that the two bankers have given themselves in the form of loans not only the entire Bank’s equity, but also another BGN 500 million in account holders’ money.

Cessions and raiding: How bad loans become “weak” …

By law, such a concentration of loans should not be possible. But as in the case of CCB, all supervisory institutions in Bulgaria have kept their eyes shut for years.

One of the reasons for this cover-up is FIB becoming the new “shelter” of the loans of the companies associated with Delyan Peevski after the collapse of CCB in 2014. Even the BNB stress test from 2016 did not reveal anything wrong with FIB. But under the threat of the forthcoming stress test of the ECB, FIB undertook a “cleansing” of its troubled loan portfolio through various tricks and cessions.

One of the tricks involves deferring the loan to the distant future with annexes to the original contract. For example, in May 2021, the repayment of the loan of Vitosha Ski to FIB in the amount of EUR 17.8 million had been postponed to 2036.

Vitosha Ski is owned by Ellora Management Limited, whose ultimate beneficiaries, according to the Pandora Files, are again Tseko Minev and Ivaylo Mutafchiev. But there is no trace of them in the Bulgarian Trade Register. There, the owner of the Cyprus office, George Papadopoulos, is listed as a Ellora representative.

However, there is another trick that stretches the law. Our investigative team followed in the footsteps of a suspicious cession, which was forced on a borrower as a condition for obtaining a loan.

In front of BIRD’s camera, the owners of the company NSA Investment told their story of being forced to sign a cession of receivables by FIB for EUR 2 million from the construction company PST Group. The unexpected extra EUR 2 million had been a prerequisite for receiving a loan of EUR 7.3 million. At the same time, they had been urged not to try to collect the cession.

“In the end, it turned out that we were given a receivable without being given any chance to collect that receivable.”

PST Group is one of the favorite companies of the governments of former Prime Minister Boyko Borisov in awarding large public procurements for road construction under the famous “in-house” procedures of Avtomagistrali AD (Highways JSC). FIB’s loan exposure to PST Group, according to the latest report, which was published for 2019, is between BGN 100 million and BGN 150 million.

PST Group AD (JSC) is owned by the Cypriot Kolvik Services and its declared ultimate owner is Kamen Kichev, a former Deputy Minister of Transport. Approached by our reported, he declined to comment on the cession.

Prior to Kolvik, the owners of the shares of PST Group included the companies Galliano Worldwide Limited and DVTG Bulgaria, which is owned by Cokeyta Group Limited. Thanks to the Pandora Papers, we now know that the majority shareholders in FIB – Minev and Mutafchiev – are once again behind Galliano Worldwide Limited and Cokeyta Group Limited.

However, when the company NSA Investment began taking steps to collect the receivable, its owner surprisingly ended in the crosshairs of the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office and spent five months in custody. His company experienced difficulties to repay the loan and FIB very quickly seized the properties that had been signed as a collateral for the loan.

One of the most lucrative among these properties, a building in downtown Sofia, was sold well below market price to the company A.A. Invest. The owner of this company is attorney Alexander Angelov, one of the most trusted people of Delyan Peevski. In June 2021, the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Peevski under the Magnitsky Act for his extensive role in corruption in Bulgaria. Angelov’s relationship with Peevski has been confirmed by the Pandora Papers as well. BIRD revealed earlier that Peevski had personally signed a document declaring himself the real owner of the shares in the offshore company Verum International Limited and had transferred these shares to Angelov.

Another building pledged by NSA Investment was bought by Insa Oil owned by Georgi Samuilov. Samuilov is considered particularly close to Peevski as well. He also acquired Peevski’s Hotel Berlin before the oligarch was sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act.

It seems that the cleansing of FIB’s loan portfolio is accompanied by a streamlined scheme for business raiding. Borrowers are forced to buy uncollectible receivables of companies linked to FIB owners in order to have their loan approved. If they attempt to collect the receivable, they are attacked by the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office. When they fail to repay their debts, their assets are sold at below market prices to companies associated with Peevski.

The tandem “FIB – Peevski”

The data from the Pandora Papers illustrate in even more than previously known detail the business relations between the owners of FIB and the oligarch Delyan Peevski. Until now only indirect information was available.

For example, the offshore company Galliano Worldwide Limited, owned by Tseko Minev and Ivaylo Mutafchiev, is represented by Ivan Sharlandzhiev, former executive director of the Plovdiv “Yuri Gagarin” cigarette packaging factory.

Since 2006, the shares of “Yuri Gagarin” had been held by Baranko EOOD (Ltd). It is managed by Westwood Invest Limited. The Pandora Papers reveal that this company is also owned by Minev and Mutafchiev. Subsequently, Delyan Peevski had entered the ownership of the cigarette packaging factory directly through Comso Tobacco.

The Pandora Papers also contain a letter of reference from FIB for Delyan Peevski dated 13 November 2016. It states that he is a “correct, reliable and respected client of the bank”. The letter was signed by two directors of FIB from the Lending Department.

Letter of reference from FIB for Delyan Peevski

At present, FIB should not hold any accounts of the oligarch as he is sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act. The BNB assures that all Bulgarian banks have terminated their relations with him and with the companies on the sanctions list. However, the situation with loans from the Bank to companies associated with Peevski remains unknown.

The institutions decline to comment

BIRD sent questions to the ECB and the BNB regarding the new data on FIB’s problematic exposures to offshore companies owned by its majority shareholders. We asked if these data were detected during the stress tests conducted by both the BNB and the ECB.

For this purpose, we also provided a representative sample of loans to several offshore companies, whose ultimate owners are Tseko Minev and Ivaylo Mutafchiev and which in 2016-2017 exceeded the legal requirement for lending no more than 20% of a bank’s capital to related parties.

So far, we have received a response only from the ECB stating “No Comment”. The institution’s press office in Frankfurt explained that they never comment on information about individual banks.

After the publication of the article, we receives a response from the BNB.

The Bulgarian National Bank adheres to the established practice within the Single Supervisory Mechanism of the ECB, including not commenting on facts and circumstances in the public domain related to specific supervised institutions, their shareholders and clients.

As an institution with a mandate to supervise the activities of banks, the BNB analyzes the entire volume of supervisory and prudential information in the course of the supervisory review and assessment process for each of its supervised banks, which is reflected in the relevant risk assessment and related additional capital requirements.

The inquiries to FIB were not answered.

The Pandora Papers contain confidential information from 14 offshore service providers, the so-called Secrecy Brokers, enterprises that set up and manage shell companies and trusts in tax havens around the globe. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has obtained more than 11.9 million financial records, containing 2.94 terabytes of leaked confidential information from these offshore service providers. For nearly two years, ICIJ organized and led an investigation that grew to encompass more than 600 journalists in 117 countries and territories. This is the ICIJ’s largest ever investigation on the offshore world unlocks financial secrets of politicians, billionaires and the global elite. BIRD.BG is the Bulgarian partner of ICIJ in the investigation.

Appendix: FIB’s exposures to Georgios Georgiou as of 2014; source Bivol

Приложение: Експозициите на ПИБ към Георгиус Георгиу към 2014 г. Източник Биволъ

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