Photo: District Prosecutor’s Office.
The municipality of Dryanovo has requested the recusal of the supervising prosecutor in the pre-trial proceedings against former mayor Miroslav Semov, who was charged with mismanagement by the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office shortly before its closure in 2022.
The municipality is also insisting on the recusal of the entire Gabrovo District Prosecutor’s Office “with a view to impartial resolution” of the ongoing six-year exchange of prosecutorial decisions to refuse to initiate criminal proceedings against Semov and the revocation of all of them by the court.
The municipality has also reported the situation to the Inspectorate of the Supreme Judicial Council, requesting that the acting chief prosecutor supervise the proceedings.
No procedural investigative actions
have been taken by the supervising prosecutor, according to the Municipality of Dryanovo, citing the court’s instructions and their complete contradiction with the actions of the prosecutor’s office, which refuses to initiate criminal proceedings, effectively exonerating Semov.
The charges against the former mayor of Dryanovo were brought by the now-closed Specialized Prosecutor’s Office and relate to mismanagement that caused damages to the municipality amounting to BGN 360,000. The damage was caused by the failure of the Higher College of Biodynamic Agriculture, which was opened in Dryanovo by Miroslav Semov himself and obviously with the blessing of the municipality, before it even began operating.
The prosecutor’s office has terminated criminal proceedings against Semov three times,
and the court has ruled three times that the dismissals were unfounded and unlawful, returning the case to the prosecutor for a new ruling.
The lengthy court rulings, the latest of which is nearly 50 pages long, clearly reveal the prosecutor’s unwillingness to comply with the court’s instructions and to provide clear and specific reasons for discontinuing further work on proving whether or not Semov is guilty of causing damage to the municipal budget. All court decisions to date (three in number) clearly show the court’s inability to compel the state prosecution to comply with the law.
“Despite our efforts, this court cannot find the words, manner, or approach to better explain the detailed instructions given twice regarding the application of the law,” reads the December 2024 court decision.
It is the third and almost literally repeats the previous two, not counting two rulings by the Veliko Tarnovo Court of Appeals. “In this situation, there is no other option but to overturn for the third time the same termination order, in which the same instructions are once again not being followed,” the court states, emphasizing that “the correct application of the law boils down solely to following the court’s instructions.”
Instead, the prosecutor in the pre-trial proceedings reproduced the facts verbatim, “even with grammatical and semantic errors, omitting only those parts that contained a list of many items or documents,” the court noted.
The higher education institution, called the Higher College of Biodynamics, never opened.
Its official opening was in March 2019 with grandiose promises and the great ambition to become the only higher education institution for biodynamic agriculture in the Balkans. However, the Ministry of Education had never heard of it.
The building that houses the so-called college is the former high school for training railway transport personnel, owned by the Municipality of Dryanovo. At the suggestion of Dryanovo Mayor Miroslav Semov in 2016, the Municipal Council leased the building for 10 years to the Regional Association for Social Prosperity, which is behind the idea for the college. The monthly rent is set at BGN 4,642, and according to the agreement between the mayor of Dryanovo and the chair of the association, Grozdalina Georgieva, for the first two years it will be used to cover the improvements and repairs that need to be made to the municipal property to make it suitable for academic purposes.
The courtyard of the old school also needs to be changed, and according to the investment plan, there should be an experimental field, a botanical garden, greenhouses, and even a tennis court, “because college students need to play sports.” According to the same contract, “the tenant is obliged to obtain registration and accreditation so that it can start operating effectively in the 2018-2019 academic year.” None of the agreed terms have been fulfilled, but in a short period of time, machinery and equipment worth hundreds of thousands of leva have been removed from the building, and electricity bills and local taxes have accumulated. By the time the municipal administration realized what was happening, it was too late to react.
Three months after the official opening of the college, at which Dryanovo Mayor Miroslav Semov cut the ribbon at the main entrance,
the municipal council decided to evict the tenants from the building.
Before the vote, the Regional Association for Social Prosperity was asked to provide explanations, but it was not clear why the association had accumulated debts to the municipality, why it was not paying rent, and where the exported machinery and equipment were. Meanwhile, the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office filed an indictment against Miroslav Semov, but the Gabrovo District Court terminated the proceedings due to deficiencies in the indictment and violations that “led to a restriction of the procedural rights of the accused.”
The case was thus returned to the prosecutor for the violations to be remedied, and the prosecutor terminated the criminal proceedings, as has already become clear three times, despite the court’s instructions to justify his refusals to bring charges.
They find indications of bias or interest in the outcome of the proceedings
in the conduct of the Dryanovo Municipality Prosecutor’s Office, citing the lack of grounds for its termination. The termination order contains twenty-eight pages, twenty-six of which repeat the content of the indictment, after which the prosecutor states that there is no indisputable evidence of intentional and culpable conduct on the part of the accused, according to the municipality in its appeal against one of the prosecutor’s orders.
Miroslav Semov’s lawyer, Tatyana Doncheva, has a different opinion.
According to her, “the prosecutor’s decision is unlawful only with regard to the stated grounds for termination” – not because no crime has been proven, but because there is no crime.
However, according to the court, the prosecutor “has reproduced the facts used to bring charges” and has thus “merely stated that there is no evidence of a crime having been committed.” Therefore, according to the court, “the decision to terminate the criminal proceedings is unfounded and unlawful” and “it cannot be discussed whether the prosecutor’s opinion that the charge has not been proven is correct, since in practice such an opinion is absent.”
The outcome of the Dryanovo Municipality’s request to remove the entire prosecutorial college and transfer the case to another judicial district remains to be seen.
