Bulgar and Nasty
For good measure we also went through the three richest Bulgarians, according to the Polish Vprost magazine, which catalogues these things every year. Worth 500 million dollars is Vassil Bozkhov, aka ‘the Skull’ and the owner of the CSKA Sofia football team and various gambling groups. Second is Darina Pavlova, Pavlov’s widow, and third is Emil Kulev, a banker and former interior ministry official.
While all three appear to have achieved some degree of legitimacy, there follows a whole swath of Bulgarian gangsterdom that does as it pleases, although not without risk: 60 have perished in the last four years. Current survivors of the SIC versus VIS scrap include men known as the Pussy Cat, the Monkey, Birdy, Slatko the Beret, the Billy Goat from Plovdiv, the Small Olive (I think the big one is a gonner) and the Beak. Most make their money from the heroin- and people-smuggling trades, and the judicial system is too weak to rein any of them in. I scribbled away, only to be interrupted by the trilling of the mobile phone of Dimitar, one of the journalists. A tip-off: there was something happening in Sliven, he was told; someone had been blown up in a VW Touareg.
Which brought us round to Adrian Musgrave and Brits and property prices, and Dimitar reflected sadly that his brother, working in Burgas, was coining it. He had recently been to see him and learn a few tricks of the trade. ‘If someone wants to sell at E150,000, put it on the market at E180,000 because some idiot is bound to buy it for more,’ he had been advised. All the hacks knew British retirees living in villages somewhere - in the mountains, near the vineyards, around Sunny Beach - paying peanuts for the servitude of locals happy to augment their own humble Bulgarian state handouts. Most journalists, it seemed, wanted to get into the property business: it was easy money, and certainly better than having the Small Olive ringing your office asking if he could have a word about your funeral.
The rain persisted, blurring the windows and making the BNP’s EU countdown clock indistinct. It is registering at around the 470 mark, but last week in Brussels the Bulgarians were given a dossier with red, amber and green sections, warning of potential delays. In the red section, according to the Bulgarian press, is the judicial system which, until it can deal with SIC and VIS, is clearly pretty hopeless.
At Sofia airport I listened as a gaggle of Wanderers fans described how they had been pelted with bottles and glasses in Burgas; other departing Brits on the bus out to the flight apron talked excitedly about prices per square metre, and 26 per cent rises this year and next. Maybe the land of Slatko the Beret is the answer to the pensions crisis, and maybe Veliki Trnovo will be the new Barcelona. But on taking off through the fog I had an uneasy feeling there could be a little drowning at the end of the river en route.
By Tom Walker
The Spectator
