Bulgaria Axes Port Burgas Management over Suspected Violations

The entire board of Port Burgas was replaced over "failure to perform" only 9 months after it was appointed to do better than its predecessors. Photo by BGNES

Bulgaria’s Transport Minister has fired the entire board of directors of the Black Sea Port of Burgas less than a year after it was appointed in the wake of a police operation investigating violations of the port management.

The Transport Minister’s formal motive for the dismissal of the three top managers – CEO Ruslan Petkov and the other two board members Veselin Kraev and Krastan Zolumov – is “failure to perform” when doing their jobs.

Shortly after the dismissal was announced, the Transport Ministry appointed Diyan Dimov, the current head of the “Operations” Directorate at the port, as the new CEO of one of Bulgaria’s two major Black Sea ports.

Karamfilka Apostolova and Nasko Drakov, who have not worked at the Port of Burgas before, have been appointed members of the board replacing the other two fired managers.

The sacking of the three managers of the Port of Burgas came hours after special police units and prosecutors stormed the port administration buildings in order to investigate allegations made recently by a report, which indicated evidence for large-scale malfeasance and other violations of the managers.

The report in question was presented on May 26, 2010, by Zhivko Petrov, the Director of Bulgaria’s Sea Administration Directorate, during a meeting of Burgas Port Security Council (consisting of the port management and representatives of state institutions involved with the port).

There has been no official confirmation yet that the three fired managers are suspected of specific crimes.

Ironically, Ruslan Petkov, Veselin Kraev, and Krastan Zolumov were appointed to the Board of Port of Burgas in September 2009 after the previous port CEO Argir Boyadzhiev and the other port members were given the ax over an audit report of the Transport Ministry showing that the management had repeated violated the public procurement procedures as stipulated by the respective legislation.

Before his appointment as the executive director of Port Burgas in September 2009, Ruslan Petkov had the job of his present successor - head of the “Operations” Directorate of the port.

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