Bulgaria’s caretaker agriculture minister has spent the past months livestreaming police raids, reopening buried cases and filing referrals to prosecutors and EU investigators. In days, he’ll hand over to the incoming government and lose his office.
Ivan Hristanov is adamant that his work fighting corruption will outlast his term. Whether it will or not is now a question for Rumen Radev, the former president whose newly formed Progressive Bulgaria party won an outright parliamentary majority in elections on April 19, after promising to dismantle what he called Bulgaria’s “oligarchic governance model.” It’s the same machinery Hristanov has spent his short term in office documenting.
Hristanov’s case files are Radev’s first test.
“I have embodied in myself two roles,” Hristanov told POLITICO. “The first one is the minister. The second one is the whistleblower. They can cut me off from the government. But my role as a whistleblower will live long after that.”
Bulgaria rates worst in the EU, tied with Hungary, on Transparency International’s most recent corruption index. EU funds, the country’s largest source of public investment, have been the subject of hundreds of fraud investigations in recent years involving phantom farms, inflated contracts and politically connected middlemen.
Hristanov was appointed in February to a caretaker cabinet led by Prime Minister Andrey Gyurov, installed after the previous government collapsed in December following the largest anti-corruption protests Bulgaria had seen in decades. These caretaker cabinets — the country has had 10 in five years — are normally narrow housekeepers tasked with organizing elections. This one also took on corruption.
On a recent Webex call with POLITICO, a follow-up to an earlier interview, Hristanov spent the first five minutes adjusting his suit, straightening his tie and tidying his papers, as if this were a television broadcast and not a call with a reporter. For a man who has turned his short tenure into a livestream of corruption investigations, racking up more than 70 million Facebook views by his own count, the distinction has blurred.
The machinery of looking away
The findings came tumbling out in the cadence of someone keeping pace with a clock he cannot stop.
Two state irrigation tenders worth €169 million in EU funds, with construction costs he said were inflated more than 20-fold — work that should have cost around €43,000 — were being billed at €1 million.
An alleged livestock-incineration fraud Hristanov had first flagged as deputy minister in 2022, only to find on his return that every trace of his original complaint, electronic and paper, had been wiped from the records of four agriculture and food safety agencies.
A factory said to be producing contaminated meat that was reaching schools was owned by the wife of a member of parliament from the party of Delyan Peevski, a media oligarch sanctioned by the U.S. for corruption under its Global Magnitsky Act. (Peevski has said the sanctions are unacceptable and that he hasn’t participated in acts of corruption.)
Each referral now joins a queue. Bulgaria’s prosecution service is where such cases have historically gone to die.
“The lack of any follow-up from the Bulgarian prosecution continues to be the main bottleneck,” said Ruslan Stefanov, chief economist at the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia. EU institutions and civil society groups have long documented the same pattern. Investigations stall. Files get terminated. Few reach court.
‘Where rich people go with escort girls’
Then Hristanov got to the ski lodge.
High on Vitosha Mountain, on the forested outskirts of Sofia, sits a property Hristanov has valued at €10 million. It has panoramic views, 20 rooms, a ski lift 100 meters away and surrounding parkland maintained at state expense.
The property is owned by the agriculture ministry. A previous administration had agreed to sell it to a company linked to Bulgarian businessman Rumen Gaitanski for €500,000. The contract had been signed, but the sale was not yet complete when Hristanov took office. Gaitanski, known in local media as “The Wolf,” has been in pretrial detention since August 2024 on separate embezzlement charges related to a loan from a state-owned lender, the Bulgarian Development Bank, to one of his other companies. He has denied wrongdoing in that case.
The €500,000 sum, Hristanov said, might buy a “mediocre” apartment in central Sofia. He went to see the lodge for himself, camera rolling and footage posted to Facebook the same day.
“It is like one of those places where rich people go with escort girls,” he said, his composure giving way to something between disbelief and indignation. “Literally, I am not kidding. Expensive furniture, but at the same time, you know, it is like six apartments. With huge beds.”
The video has drawn over 600,000 views on Facebook; well over a million if you count other channels, according to Hristanov. His ministry has blocked the property sale and proposed transferring the lodge to the education ministry, to be used by schoolchildren. Hristanov said the buyer’s side has demanded €1 million in compensation. Lawyers for Gaitanski did not reply to a request for comment.
A country between governments
Radev, who resigned the presidency in January to run in the election, took nearly 45 percent of the vote.
His win triggered the immediate resignation of acting Prosecutor General Borislav Sarafov. Reform advocates and opposition lawmakers had for years accused Sarafov of shielding figures, including three-time Prime Minister Boyko Borisov and Peevski, the sanctioned media mogul. In his resignation statement, Sarafov said he had made the decision “some time ago” and delayed it to avoid destabilizing the prosecution service. He did not address the accusations.
The new parliament now has the supermajority needed to overhaul the Supreme Judicial Council and appoint a new prosecutor general, a reform the EU has long pressed for.
Anti-corruption was central to Radev’s campaign and he told reporters on election day that Bulgaria had a “historic chance to break once and for all with the oligarchic Peevski-Borisov model.” Sarafov’s resignation gave him a cost-free first installment on the promise.
Brussels welcomed the result. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa rushed to congratulate him, hailing Bulgaria as “a proud member of the European family.” That was despite Brussels’ own concerns about Radev’s record of softness on Russia.
Analysts in and outside Bulgaria have been more cautious. Radev assembled Progressive Bulgaria from his own networks of former cabinet ministers he had appointed during his presidency, members of his presidential administration, and politicians who had drifted from the now-defunct Bulgarian Socialist Party. He won by drawing in Euroskeptic voters, eurozone skeptics and Bulgarians sympathetic to Moscow. The party’s been described as an ideologically incoherent base that needs an issue everyone can agree on.
“Anti-corruption is the logical unifier,” said Maria Simeonova of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Sofia. But the same arithmetic that makes the unifier necessary makes deep enforcement risky. Governing means alliances and a parliamentary group full of new MPs who will expect to be rewarded with appointments, state contracts and regional patronage, she said.
Even Sarafov’s resignation looks more like a showpiece than the start of a bigger change, some analysts say: visible, attention-grabbing, but not the start of a fundamental shift. Sarafov stepped down, said Emilia Zankina of Temple University Rome and a specialist in Bulgarian politics, because “he expected that Radev would come after him.”
She said Radev might take some headline actions, but not much else. The coalition logic that demands the anti-corruption rhetoric to hold his base, in her view, also means Radev cannot afford the disruption of pursuing it too deeply.
“A few people may change here and there, but the model Peevski-Borisov will simply be replaced with the Radev model of one-person rule.”
Radev’s Progressive Bulgaria did not respond to a request for comment.
A minister without a seat
Hristanov founded his anti-corruption movement, Edinenie (Unity), in 2023. In January, it joined three smaller parties to form an Anti-Corruption Bloc that contested the April 19 election.
The bloc did not win the minimum 4 percent of the vote necessary to claim seats in parliament, and Hristanov was not on the ballot. That was a choice, he explained, to keep the caretaker government “equally distanced from all the political parties.” Voters could not connect what they were watching on Facebook to a name on their ballot paper.
Asked whether he trusts Radev, Hristanov demurred. “Any new government should have their 100 days. Let’s give them this credit of trust, and then we see.”
And beyond the 100 days?
“If they are good, they are good. If they are bad, then we hit.”
Bulgaria exposed its corruption. Prosecuting it is Radev’s first test.
Source: Viral Showbiz Pinay
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