Bulgaria's Ethnic Turkish Party Demands Delay of Committee Meeting

The deputy chair of the ethnic Turkish party DPS, Lyutvi Mestan, has demanded a postponement of the Parliamentary Anti-corruption Committee meeting on the case of alleged embezzlement of DPS leader Ahmed Dogan. Photo by BGNES

The deputy chair of the ethnic Turkish Party DPS has demanded a postponement of the meeting of the Parliamentary Anti-corruption Committee for the case of the alleged embezzlement by the DPS leader.

Lyutvi Mestan, the deputy chair of DPS, has stated that the meeting should be postponed in order not to rush the case in 15 minutes.

The meeting of the Committee was scheduled for Friday following the demand of the Bulgarian PM Boyko Borisov.

The Committee was supposed to vote Thursday on sending the DPS leader, Ahmed Dogan, to the judiciary over allegations that he pocketed BGN 1,5 M as a consultant of hydro projects funded by the state.

However, the Committee failed to vote after three of its members surprisingly did not show up.

Borislav Velikov, MP from the Bulgarian Socialist Party, Kamen Kostadinov from DPS and Nikolay Kotsev from the ruling GERB party, failed to appear at the meeting for what were said to be “personal reasons”, triggering suspicions of behind-the-scene moves aimed to rescue Ahmed Dogan.

“Someone does not want to solve the issue and prefers to just postpone it,” the chair of the Committee Dimo Gyaurov from the right-wing Blue Coalition, commented.

According to Gyaurov the commission was highly likely to support the proposal for approaching the Supreme Administrative Court on the back of the strong evidence gathered.

The chair of the Committee has stated that he has received a call from Borisov who claimed that there have been no political agreements with DPS and demanded that the case should be discussed again Friday.

Lyutvi Mestan has stated that according to the Parliamentary regulations, Committees cannot gather at the same when Plenary Hall meetings are held.

“This would mean that the meeting will be held only during the break, which is from 10:30 am to 11 am,” he said, noting that since the meeting will be held in a different building, it will probably be very formal and will be finished in ten minutes..

The DPS deputy chair also added that Ahmed Dogan has not been sent the materials for the meeting.

“If the political bias overcome, despite our compelling reasons, then we will demand that the meeting should be held in full transparency, in the main hall, with provided access to all media, interested in the case,” Mestan said.

He also insisted that the Committee should read its whole report to the media, so that they can see that “there is nothing in common between the content of the report and the conclusions”.

In his words, the case have been transferred from the field of legal considerations to the field of dirty politics.

“This is a massive manipulation aiming at making the situation around this case radical. The goal is to trigger suspicions of agreements between DPS and GERB, in order to take an extreme decision,”Mestan said.

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