Tutrakan Municipality has launched the infrastructure project “Repair of the Road and Pavement Surface on Dimitar Blagoev Street” with a ceremonial groundbreaking.
The project is being implemented under a grant agreement signed with the State Fund Agriculture as part of the Strategic Plan for the Development of Agriculture and Rural Areas.
The total grant funding amounts to €1.157 million including VAT.
The street is a central thoroughfare in the Danube town, and the renovation covers a key 1,685-metre section. The main objectives are to improve the road’s technical condition, increase traffic safety and provide an adequate drainage system.
Who won the contract?
The public procurement procedure for the construction work was launched by Tutrakan Municipality on 30 May 2025.
Four construction companies submitted bids: Patperfect-T JSC, Road Maintenance Novi Pazar Ltd, and the consortium formed by Pat Trade and Katmar 13 Ltd.
The committee appointed by the mayor admitted only the financial offer of Road Maintenance Novi Pazar Ltd, managed by DPS–New Beginning activist Yusmen Yusmen. The other bidders were excluded for failing to meet the contracting authority’s requirements.
The contract was signed with the winning company in February 2026 at a price of €930,790.51 including VAT.
The winning company is well known in Shumen region and regularly wins construction and road maintenance contracts. Some of the projects it has carried out in the Deliorman region were also cited in the tender documentation in Tutrakan.
Until recently, Road Maintenance Novi Pazar was owned and managed by activists from the Shumen regional organisation of the Bulgarian Socialist Party.
Until 2025, the company was managed by Dilyana Parusheva.
As “Za Istinata” has reported, Dilyana Parusheva is the wife of Ivan Ganchev, the former regional chairman of the BSP in Shumen, who resigned from the party leadership and, together with Novi Pazar mayor Georgi Georgiev and the entire municipal BSP leadership, subsequently moved to Rumen Radev’s political formation.
Parusheva also became known through an investigation by the website BIRD as one of the largest donors to Rumen Radev’s “Progressive Bulgaria”, contributing €20,000 to its election campaign.
Links to Peevski
According to BIRD, the donation to “Progressive Bulgaria” “came from the pocket of a politician from Delyan Peevski’s party”.
“Formally, the donor of this amount is Dilyana Parusheva. The source of the money was declared as a gift from a parent following the sale of company shares, but the company belonged to Parusheva’s late father and in 2025 was sold to Yusmen Shakir Yusmen, an activist of DPS–New Beginning, a parliamentary candidate and current municipal councillor in Varna,” BIRD reported.
Yusmen Yusmen, who had been active in the DPS in Varna before the party split, ran for the Varna Municipal Council in the 2023 local elections as a DPS independent-list candidate.
In the October 2024 snap parliamentary elections, he was sixth on the Varna candidate list of DPS–New Beginning.
The transfer of Parusheva family-owned company shares took place in mid-May 2025 – shortly before the company submitted a bid in the Tutrakan public procurement procedure.
The company subsequently became part of Epos Group and Yusmen Shakir Yusmen became its manager.
Tutrakan mayor Dimitar Stefanov has not openly declared support for Delyan Peevski. In 2025, however, the approval of projects financed by the State Fund Agriculture under the Strategic Plan for the Development of Rural Areas reportedly also involved mediation by the leader of DPS–New Beginning.
As “Za Istinata” previously reported, Mадан mayor Fahri Molaysenov spoke in 2025 about such mediation by Peevski in connection with funding from the State Fund Agriculture for the renovation of the local community centre.
“The approval became possible thanks to the active support of Mr Delyan Peevski,” Molaysenov wrote at the time in a Facebook post.
The grant agreement for the Tutrakan project was signed with the State Fund Agriculture in November 2025 – after Yusmen Yusmen’s company had won the procurement.
The question now is whether the grant agreement was also concluded only after Peevski’s approval.
