Bulgarian football referee arrested over highway project

Football referee and former tax official Borislav Kolev has been arrested on suspicion of laundering €26.5 million granted by the state for constructing the country’s longest highway, Hemus.

According to unofficial police information, his brother is an employee of one of the largest Bulgarian construction companies involved in constructing the highway in Northern Bulgaria, newspaper 24 Chasa reports.

The state gave the money first to the state-owned company Avtomagistrali, which selected private companies to carry out the construction without a public procurement tender. The money is then believed to have been transferred to shell companies. After that, the sums were withdrawn at cash registers.

According to information from the Bulgarian investigative website Bird.bg, one of the people who withdrew the money at the cash register was a homeless person who received over €9 million and later died of COVID-19.

(Krassen Nikolov | EURACTIV.bg)