Operative workers from the former criminal militia are confronted with the silence and indifference of citizens who have witnessed a crime that authorities are investigating. Thus, in one sentence, the story of the old Bulgarian film “I don’t know, I didn’t hear, I didn’t see” can be retold. Another “film”, in which a business trip to Israel of Varna Mayor Ivan Portnich turned into, in the winter of 2018, turned out to have a very similar plot. So similar that even its title may be the same.
The story only came to light at the height of last year’s local election campaign. Then, with an anonymous e-mail to Bulgarian media, two articles were sent, published on February 20, 2018 in Israeli publications. They claim that the visit of the Mayor of Varna was terminated prematurely due to alcohol abuse and scandalous behavior in the hotel where he was accommodated.
Portnich himself and everyone who has anything to do with the case – the municipal administration in Haifa, the Bulgarian Embassy in Israel, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sofia – are stubbornly silent as of today about what happened two years ago. “I have not heard” was the short answer on the topic by Prime Minister Boyko Borissov himself, who, in last fall, personally advertised Portnich’s candidacy for a third term as “one of the most successful mayors of GERB.”
With this consensual silence and after last year’s victory of GERB in the mayoral elections in Varna, the story is about to fade completely. The only visible consequence is for Elena Kirova – journalist from the small Varna TV Station “Cherno More” who was forced to leave her job after asking Portnich questions about his trip to Haifa during a pre-election interview.
And the story, although outdated, is important and should be told for several reasons. The first is that during his trip to Israel, the Mayor of Varna apparently did not fulfil a decision of the Municipal Council and no one sought an explanation or responsibility for this. The second is that four months ago Ivan Portnich took over the governance of the city for the third time, and the city for years has been dragged to the bottom by secret conspiracies, arrogant governance and classified truths. And another reason – the attempt of “Dnevnik” to verify the facts reported in the Israeli media publications that were developed almost according to the script of the film “I don’t know, I didn’t hear, I didn’t see”, but it makes visible the well-functioning mechanism by which the people of power hide their secrets.
The memorandum with Haifa: an urgent solution
On February 16, 2018, the Municipal Council of Varna voted a decision instructing the Mayor Ivan Portnich to fly to the third largest city in Israel – Haifa (over 1 million people in the agglomeration) and to sign a memorandum with his then colleague Jonah Yahav for strategic cooperation. The proposal for the trip belongs to the mayor himself. With the motive for “protection of important public interests” even preliminary execution of the decision was allowed – i.e. it could have been implemented before it finally entered into force and before the expiry of the terms for its appeal.
Immediately after the decision was taken, the Mayor of Varna, two employees of his administration and the Honorary Consul of Israel in Varna left for Haifa. But they returned four days later without completing their assigned task. The memorandum has not been signed, only one formal and meaningless information about the trip has been published on the municipal website and the reasons why the goal has not been met sunk into deep secret.
The order for sending Portnih to Haifa on official trip, copy of which “Dnevnik” received under the Access to Public Information Act, was issued by the Chairman of the Municipal Council in Varna Todor Balabanov yet on February 7, 2018 – nine days before the coucilors voted on the text of the memorandum that was to be signed. For the fulfillment of the assigned task, Portnih himself sent Rosalina Dimitrova, Head of his cabinet, and Stanislav Stiliyanov, Chief Expert “Protocol”. The fourth seconded was the Honorary Consul of the State of Israel in Varna – Prof. Dr. Krassimir Metodiev.
An embarrassing incident
According to the documents provided to “Dnevnik”, the trip took place between February 17 and 20, 2018. Rooms for four persons were booked in a luxury hotel of the “Dan Carmel” chain in Haifa, which guarantees a high level of service. The prices for a single room there are between 380 and 470 BGN per night depending on the view. But exactly on the last day of the business trip, two Israeli online publications – News Haifa Curiot and the website of the conservative TV canal “Channel 20”, published almost identical texts with the same author – Eliran Tal. In them he states the following:
“The mayor of Bulgaria’s third-largest city stayed at a prestigious hotel in Haifa, and according to evidence obtained by a News Haifa Curiot reporter, he got drunk the night after his scheduled meeting that day by drinking large amounts of alcohol. According to other evidence, the mayor of Varna even sexually harassed a hotel employee.” (Machine translation from Hebrew into several Western European languages has been used – author’s note).
The second article informs that the embarrassing incident had come to the attention of Haifa Mayor Jonah Yahav, after which all scheduled meetings with Portnich had been canceled. “Haifa Municipality confirmed what happened, but did not provide more details,” Eliran Tal wrote.
All attempts to contact the author of the article through the media he works for were unsuccessful. There was no response to the message sent to him on Twitter – according to Tal’s colleagues, the most reliable way to contact him. At the same time, both of his texts, published in News Haifa Curiot and “Channel 20”, are still available here. Not a single line of rebuttal has been added to them in two years. The right of reply does not appear to have been requested either.
Once in October last year – on the eve of the local vote, information about the articles appeared in the Bulgarian press, on October 16 last year. Ivan Portnich reacted with a post on Facebook, in which he called what was written “election techniques”.
“If all this were true, then how would I personally meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Varna a little later after the ‘scandal’?” He asked. His post was accompanied by photos of him meeting Netanyahu and his wife at Varna airport in early November 2018. An important detail in this post is that Portnich’s presence at the flight of stairs was only a matter of protocol – the Israeli Prime Minister arrived in Bulgaria at the invitation of his colleague Boyko Borissov for a meeting in “Euxinograd” with their colleagues from Serbia, Greece and Romania.
Searched by “Dnevnik”, Ivan Portnich at first declined comment on the publications about the scandal in Haifa in the winter of 2018, arguing that they were written in Hebrew. After the two texts were provided to him in Bulgarian translation, through his press service he again quoted verbatim his post on Facebook from October last year.
Signing is a long process
Following a request under the Access to Public Information Act, the municipal administration submitted to “Dnevnik” the reports on the business trip. They are three – by Rosalina Dimitrova, Stanislav Stiliyanov and Prof. Dr. Krassimir Metodiev. But the comparison of them shows that they are with completely identical text, copied letter by letter. The reports, copied “under indigo”, do not mention a word about the realization of the task with which the business travelers made the trip – signing of Memorandum of Cooperation (twinning) between the municipalities of Varna and Haifa.
To the questions on this occasion from the press center of the Municipality of Varna they answered that the decision of the Municipal Council to sign a memorandum was “authoritative, not mandatory” and did not even have a deadline for implementation.
However, such an excuse is in complete contradiction with the preliminary execution of the decision for signing the document without waiting for the deadlines for its possible appeal. According to the text of the Code of Administrative Procedure, an order for preliminary execution is allowed “when it is necessary to ensure the life or health of citizens, to protect particularly important state or public interests, in case of danger that the execution of the act may be thwarted or seriously hampered or if the delay in execution may result in significant or hardly reparable damage.”
It logically follows from the content of this regulation that the decision taken by the Municipal Council in Varna was not only imperative, but also any delay in its implementation – inadmissible.
After almost a month of procrastination, reminders and a series of reservations, the Honorary Consul of Israel in Varna Prof. Dr. Krassimir Metodiev explained in response to questions about the failed mission in Haifa that the signing of a memorandum was a long process, and between 17 and 20 February 2018 only its beginning was set. Then he advised: “look for the positive, look for the constructive”.
Two years after Metodiev’s business trip to Haifa, the “complex process” in which he himself was involved is still incomplete, no matter how positive the look on its development is. Although, according to the minutes of the meeting of the Municipal Commission for European Affairs and International Cooperation on February 14, 2018 (days before the visit of the degeneration) Rosalina Dimitrova has reported the following: “We are currently at a stage where we can practically proceed to the signing on a memorandum after a very long correspondence with the mayor’s office there (in Haifa – note of editor) and the mayor of the city “.
The questions sent by “Dnevnik’ on the case to the press center of the current mayor of Haifa Einat Kalisch-Rotem (who replaced Jonah Yahav in the fall of 2018) remained without official answer.
An “off the record” administration official, speaking under condition of anonymity, confirmed that the reason for the lack of progress in signing the memorandum was precisely the events described in Eliran Tal’s two articles in News Haifa Curiot and “Channel 20”. According to one of them, the Bulgarian embassy in Tel Aviv was immediately informed about what had happened.
But the then Bulgarian Ambassador Dimitar Mihailov, is no longer in office and a connection with him cannot be established. For this reason, the questions addressed to our diplomatic mission in Tel Aviv were forwarded by standard procedure to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From the Ministry they informed that are not informed of an incident with the mayor of Varna during his visit to Israel two years ago.
The questions sent to the management of the “Dan Carmel” Hotel in Haifa remained without an answer as well.
I will control it personally
The attempt of “Dnevnik” to obtain an opinion from the Head of the Varna Municipal Council explaining what had prevented the mayor from doing the work assigned to him remained unsuccessful.
In accordance with the provisions of the Law on Local Self-Government and Local Administration, the order for the secondment of Ivan Portnih was issued by the Chairman of the Municipal Council Todor Balabanov. Its text explicitly states: “I will exercise personal control over the execution of this order.” On December 9, 2019, “Dnevnik” requested information on the results of this control. However, ignoring all the deadlines established by the Law on Access to Public Information, there is no decision on this request as of today.
The title of the 1984 film “I Don’t Know, I Didn’t Hear, I Didn’t See” refers to the Asian sculpture of the three monkeys covering their eyes, snouts and ears with paws to keep what they know as a secret. Its message is often compared to “omertà” – the silence of the mafia, which no one dares to break.
