Key political player in Bulgaria arrested for influence peddling ahead of elections

Key lawmaker Ceyhan Ibramov, who is close to Ahmed Dogan, the founder of Turkish minority party Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), has been arrested on charges of influence peddling and accepting money to illegally buy votes.

This makes Ibramov the highest-profile politician to be arrested in Bulgaria since 2022, when long-serving now-former prime minister Boyko Borissov spent just one night in custody but was never charged with a crime.

The Sofia Court said Ibramov should be detained because he risked committing another crime. The authorities arrested him with 100,000 leva (€50,000) marked in advance, which he had demanded from a friend to use to illegally buy votes in the parliamentary elections scheduled for 27 October, prosecutors said.

In exchange for this money, Ibramov promised his friend he would help him win public contracts from the Defence Ministry. The prosecution argued that the lawmaker had contacts in the ministry because he had been a member of the parliamentary defence committee for many years.

According to the investigators, Ibramov had asked his friend for 200,000 leva, but he wanted at least several million leva. The prosecutor said some of the money he took to buy votes was in the inside pocket of his jacket, and some was in a paper envelope he was holding.

Miroslav Todorov, who gave him the money, is also a witness in the case and has provided a detailed testimony. Two months ago, Todorov was arrested for tax offences but released shortly afterwards.

Ibramov's arrest comes at a time of serious crisis for the MRF, one of Bulgaria's oldest parties and a long-standing member of the European liberal ALDE group.

In August, Delyan Peevski, sanctioned by the US under the Magnitsky Act for corruption, caused a split in the party. Half of the MRF MPs announced their loyalty to Peevski, while the rest stood by the party's founder, Ahmed Dogan.

In July, ALDE's leadership told Euractiv that MRF could be expelled from the European liberal party because of Peevski's influence.

Representatives of the party close to Dogan, including Dogan himself, gathered outside parliament on Saturday to protest against Ibramov’s arrest and then marched to the court building. They claim that Peevski has taken over the Bulgarian judiciary.

"The state and all the authorities are against us, so we will do everything we can to reach the normality we have always wanted," said Dogan.

The split in the MRF is one of the most dangerous consequences of the ongoing political crisis in Bulgaria. The Turkish minority makes up about 10% of the Bulgarian population, and the MRF and Dogan have always presented themselves as the bearers of ethnic peace in the country.

Turkish President Recep Erdogan has never hidden his interest in the events surrounding the MRF and the country's Turkish ethnic minority.

Over the past 30 years, Dogan has always managed to maintain the secular character of the party and distance from Turkey, while his formation has often been accused of involvement in numerous corruption scandals, including those involving Peevski.

(Krassen Nikolov | Euractiv.bg)