I was joking in my last post when I suggested that the Bulgarian crisis resembled “Game of Thrones”. But from the responses from people much more knowledgeable than me, it seems it really is like that. Bulgarian oligarchs fighting each other for political and financial power, forming and breaking alliances and stitching each other up. And the fight is to the death.
Meet Tzvetan Vassilev. In 2013 he was named “most influential Bulgarian” by Forbes. A banker by profession, he owns 100% of the shares of a finance house called Bromak EOOD, which until very recently owned just over 50% of Bulgaria’s fourth largest lender, CorpBank. He also owns other businesses and employs about 16,000 people. In Bulgaria, owning a bank doesn’t mean you provide capital, sit back and rake in the returns. It means you control lending decisions. You can direct funding to your own businesses and those of friends and relatives. And that is exactly how Vassilev used Corpbank.
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