“It was clear as early as 2024 that this charge was not going to stand. The very legal construction of this charge, to me, doomed it from the start.” This was said in an interview with bTV’s “Face to Face” program by the former acting Minister of Justice Andrey Yankulov on the occasion of the court decision in the case against Petyo Petrov, known as Pepi Euroto.
Yankulov, who was also part of the Anti-Corruption Fund, recalled that even when the indictment was filed, he predicted the failure of the case. He said the document fraud charge was legally difficult to defend because it suggested prosecutors had been “misled” by false documents. “There is no way they were misled by the evil genius of Pepi Euroto. This is rather a kind of collaboration between the two,” commented the lawyer.
Yankulov stressed that instead of a serious punishable crime, in the end it was only a document violation that led to an administrative sanction. “The prosecutor has this great power, which is practically unchallenged, to do whatever he wants,” the former justice minister believes.
In the interview, Yankulov made comparisons between old scandals in the judicial system and the current addictions surrounding the Eight Dwarfs and Martin Bojanov-Notary. “These activities have passed into heavy gang structures. This is not a club of interests where they talk about law and morality. These are literally criminal gang structures,” announced Yankulov. He pointed to the case of Yavor Zlatanov as an example of the severe consequences of such addictions.
Yankulov also commented on the practice of landmark investigations starting with ostentatious arrests and media leaks, but without a real end in court: “All these cases are conducted like this. The goal is to get some kind of public stigmatization.”
According to him, evidence is often used not for convictions, but for media influence. At the end of the conversation, Andrey Yankulov also commented on the scandal of the European Prosecutor Teodora Georgieva. “There is no way to deny the involvement of the government in these processes for the appointment of the European prosecutors,” emphasized the former justice minister.
Source: Actualno
