Minority Stake in Bulgarian Daily Standart Switches Owners

Top Bulgarian daily Standart has not been bought by the controversial New Bulgarian Media Group, as earlier reports Wednesday have claimed.

34.5% of the paper have been sold to GM Press, owned by the president of the volleyball CSKA team Georgi Georgiev.

The remaining 65.5% of Standart remain in the hands of Todor Batkov, who owned 100% of the shares up to now.

Batkov remains the president of the Board of Directors of the paper, which will be increased with two representatives of the new shareholder. The editor-in-chief of Standart remains Slavka Bozukova.

Earlier Wednesday the Cross information agency reported that Standart has been bought by Delyan Peevski, son of controversial New Bulgarian Media Group Irena Krasteva.

New Bulgarian Media Group owns the national BBT TV channel, the Telegraf daily, Weekend weekly, Monitor daily, Politika weekly, the newly-created Vseki Den daily, as well as the local Veliko Tarnovo daily Borba and the Plovdiv daily Maritsa. (Telegraf and Weekend are the highest-circulation daily and weekly in Bulgaria.)

Apart from the concentration of media in its hands, the New Bulgarian Media Group has been criticised for an apparent lack of clarity as to the provenance of its assets.

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