A Sofia policeman is systematically harassed because he has sent to court the “mother-in-law” of his direct supervisor. For several months, the Sofia Directorate of the Interior Ministry (SDVR) and the Interior Ministry stubbornly refuse to comment on the case.
The indictment is against Eleonora Aleksandrova Genova. She has used a false will to acquire the title of an apartment in the Lozenets district of Sofia. Subsequently, the apartment has been sold to a third party. Eleonora Genova, however, is not just anyone. She is the mother of the woman with whom Chief Investigating Officer, Stoyan Tsvetkov, cohabitates. He is the Head of the Economic Crime Investigation Unit at the 4th District Police Precinct at SDVR.
Fraud, document forgery, corruption, providing cover-up for an organized crime group and abuse of office – these are just some of the texts in the Penal Code that the competent authorities could use in the case.
An investigation has been made possible thanks to a retired hospital head nurse, who has become an insurmountable obstacle to the plans of the criminal group. As a co-owner of the condominium where the lucrative home is located, she has managed to overcome the passivity of local police and the prosecutor’s office.
The following part of the story may be harmful to the respected reader because the investigation begins with
An intolerable reek
In the literal sense as it has been caused by a natural phenomenon. The follow-up also smells unpleasantly, but in a figurative sense, because of the corrupt practices in the Ministry of Interior.
“Come in the shade as I am an elderly woman and I will suffer a stroke. The heat is too much,” these are the lady’s first words when she opens the door. I explain to her that I am a journalist from Bivol and I am interested in a fraud with an apartment in her building. This is apartment number 32, and the building is located on “Kozyak” street in “Lozenets”. The neighborhood is expensive and I am not surprised that the scammers have spotted this exact property.
Initially, the lady is not very eager to talk. “First of all, I do not know you, I do not know that you are a journalist and I do not believe anybody!” She is firm. When she is makes sure that I am a journalist, the lady, whose identity we will not disclose, tells me that in three months, three individuals have appeared with notary deeds and claims to apartment 32. In the course of the conversation, I learn that she is also condominium manager.
It all started when Boris Ivanov Djulumdjiev, owner of the said apartment, died. In the condominium building on Kozyak street, everyone knows each other because they are all colleagues – former medics. The deceased man has been the only “outsider.” Years ago, Djulumdjiev lived next to the “Hemus” Hotel. After his parents’ death, as he had no family, he sold his home there and bought another, smaller one – apartment 32.
“He was very quiet, kind and well-mannered; he paid his condo fees,” says the condo manager. “The smell is how we learned that he has died. I was waiting for him to pay his fee for January 2014 and then I went to ring his doorbell. The smell of a decomposing body was all over the building already. Neighbors called the police. When the “competent authorities” arrived, they found him. According to the coroners, he had died about 15 days earlier.
The policemen came in, they brought him out. They took him to Forensic Medicine. One of the police officers asked me to sign a protocol in my capacity as condo manager stating that he was taking the keys for the deceased’s home. We have never seen Djulumdjiev with another person. And I asked the police if they knew who his heirs were. The police officers replied that they did not know for sure, but that “it seemed that there are no heirs,” the lady said.
However, the unbearable stench remained. Within a week, the retired nurse started ringing the 4th District Police Precinct daily in an attempt to have someone from their staff open the apartment of the deceased so that it could be cleaned.
“It started crossing my mind that they were not looking for the heirs. I was worried because the smell from the dwelling was so strong.”
The police instructed her to get in touch with the prosecutor’s office. She did and filed an application for permission to clean up the apartment of Boris Djulumdjiev. The magistrates, however, denied it. “They were prompt; they gave us an answer that this cannot be done.”
The man died at the end of February and in May the apartment still smelled. The woman continued her attempts to communicate with the 4th District Police Precinct. Finally, the precinct banned her from ringing.
Occupation: Investigating Condo Manager
At that point, the lady took things “in her own hands” and embarked on finding Djulumdjiev’s heirs. She contacted the ESGRAON office (Unified System of Civil registration and Administrative Services of the Population) at the Sofia City Hall and explained the situation. “Half an hour later, the woman called and said he had heirs.” The municipal employee told her the names of two cousins of the deceased from the city of Plovdiv.
Despite the ban, the lady called again the 4th District Police Precinct and informed them about her discovery. She asked the police to find the cousins and contact them. They refused. Then, through the address obtained from ESGRAON, the retired nurse found the cousins’ phones and managed to get in touch with them. The relatives arrived straight away. The woman asked them to take the body of their cousin from Forensic Medicine and bury him.
After almost four months, the man was finally buried. But when the cousins went to the retrieve keys to open the apartment and clean it, it turned out that this was impossible. They were told by the City Hall the Djulumdjiev’s true heirs were two of his aunts, 91 and 92-years-old, who lived in the southern town of Madan. They were sisters of the mother of the deceased.
The retired nurse-condo manager asked to contact the aunts. After another refusal of assistance by the police, she, once again, used an old-fashioned way, without online search engines. She got the number of the Madan Town Hall. People from the Town Hall got her in touch with the aunts and their daughters. As heirs, they received permission from the prosecution and managed to enter the deceased’s property. At last the apartment was cleaned. The heirs quickly listed it for sale. Everything seemed to finally fall into place in the old Sofia condominium building. But not for long. What followed was the invasion of the
Property scammers
“One day, at the end of November (2014), a neighbor said that renovation works were going on in the apartment. I told him not to make such jokes and the conversation was over. Half an hour later, however, someone rang my doorbell. When I opened it, I saw a man and a woman who told me that they had bought the apartment. I asked when and they said that it had happened very quickly. The man also introduced himself as a lawyer.”
The new “owner” requested a key from the apartment’s door. The condo manager asked her why the sellers did not give it to her. The couple reiterated that everything had happened quickly, so the former nurse gave them a key to make a duplicate. She also noticed that the woman was trying to hide her face in her long hair.
As she waited for the return of the key, the condo manager decided to go out to a nearby store. On her way back she saw a locksmith coming out. The couple was already at her door waiting to return the key.
All this would be quickly forgotten if, a few months later, the owners from Madan had not called her on the phone. They said they were at the front door of their home, but could not get in. At this point, the condo manager realized that they had not sold the apartment. The heirs immediately alerted the prosecution. The Sofia District Prosecutor’s Office launched a preliminary probe and assigned it to the 4th District Police Precinct police officers from the Business Crimes unit. The latter worked on the case for almost a year.
Once the authorities were informed, at the end of December 2014, another couple with a notary deed for the property appeared at the address on “Kozyak” street. The man showed the deed to his neighbors. He told him that the deceased had bequeathed his apartment to him. The house manager, however, asked him to go to the police precinct on the grounds that several other people had claimed ownership of the apartment.
“There were big scandals here because we did not let him break the door of the apartment,” she says. The aggressive man was accompanied by a blond woman about 40-years-old. After this incident, Djulumdjiev’s heirs installed a security alarm to find out if someone decided to take possession of their property.
In 2016, the preliminary probe was closed and pre-trial proceedings were launched. The investigation was assigned to one of the senior investigative officers at the 4th District Police Precinct. This case became a turning point in his career. The investigating police officers discovered fraud with the apartment in question. It had been committed not by anyone but by
The mother-in-law of the chief investigator
Eleonora Genova acquired the right to property through a forged will in her favor. She presented the will to notary Tsvetanka Dimitrova who issued a notary deed to her. The investigators found no evidence that Genova knew the deceased Djulumdjiev. On the other hand, she is well acquainted with Chief Investigating Officer Stoyan Tsvetkov from the 4th District Police Precinct’s Business Crimes unit. The man is Genova’s son-in-law – he cohabitates with her daughter. One of the preliminary leads is that information on the dwelling with “no direct heirs” has reached Genova and her accomplices namely through Tsvetkov.
The notary deed based on a false will, presented by Eleonora Genova, was entered in the Property Register on November 25, 2015.
Precisely Genova is believed to be the woman who tried to cover her face with her hair. According to the investigators, the lawyer, who accompanied the woman, is Georgi Blagoev Kostadinov from the bar in the city of Kyustendil. It is not clear who prepared the false will, but graphology experts are 100% certain that it had not been written by Djulumdjiev. Prior to the launch of the investigation, Eleonora Genova had managed to sell the apartment to Vassil Mihailov Marinov, who was then a driver for the newspaper “7 Days Sport”.
The policeman took the case of his “mother-in-law” under his own special supervision
In October 2016, Tsvetkov realized that his “mother-in-law” had been already questioned in the case as a witness. He then met with the investigator who reports to him and verbally informed him “that he was taking the case under his own special supervision” and wanted to be informed about everything involving the investigation. He also verbally ordered his colleague what evidence to collect so that Eleonora Genova is not charged. All this is described in a series of reports by the pressured officer to the Inspectorate of the Ministry of the Interior and to the Minister himself.
From the moment when he began to investigate Eleonora Genova, the defiant employee had been constantly harassed by Tsvetkov. In his reports, the investigator further states that the other head of unit – Chief Investigating Police Officer Stanislava Aleksieva, who leads the “Investigation of Crimes” at the 4th District Police Precinct, has also put him under serious pressure. On November 29, 2016, she staged a meeting with the presence of all investigating police officers at the precinct, and for about an hour the man was offended and criticized. This forced the victim to alert the Chief Investigating Officer at the SDVR.
Aleksieva and Tsvetkov had also explained to the rebellious investigator that he must do what they tell him or he will have very serious problems with them.
Bivol approached Stoyan Tsvetkov to hear his side of the story. He did not deny that Eleonora Genova is the mother of the woman he lives with and asked how I had obtained that information and details about the case.
Once I clarified that I had received it via e-mail, the man explained that he was the victim of a targeted campaign. “There is one gentleman who is a member of the 4th District Police Precinct who worked on this case and who has turned against all the officers in the precinct. Including me. This is complete bullshit. There is a supervising prosecutor, there are instructions and there is no way for me to interfere with the investigation.”
Chief Investigating Officer Stanislava Aleksieva immediately hung up the phone after I introduced myself.
During our conversation, Tsvetkov further said that the whole precinct was under investigation due to his colleague’s signals. However, according to the information received by Bivol via e-mail, the investigation has not been particularly effective because police employees at the precinct have to choose whether to confirm the content of the reports or keep quiet to avoid problems with Tsvetkov and Aleksieva.
Harassment
After the first report by the “disobedient” police officer, Aleksieva quickly prepared the employees job performance ratings for the second half of 2016. She gave the “rebel” a 3, the lowest grade in the SDVR system. Meanwhile, all 17 cases he was working on had been probed by…. Stoyan Tsvetkov. Finally, he was punished with a “reprimand” for one year – a sanction that is in the process of being appealed. His additional pay for working under “special conditions” was taken away as well, again on Aleksieva’s proposal.
In mid-February 2017, Stoyan Tsvetkov was listed in the hospital. The “rebel” then immediately reported the case against Genova to the supervising prosecutor. The latter issued a decree to charge Genova with a crime. This forced Tsvetkov to decide to quit police work and since June 2017 he is no longer an employee of the Interior Ministry.
But the story does not end here. In May, the “disobedient” policeman was reassigned to the Main Unit for Combatting Organized Crime (GDBOP). However, the Human Resources Department at the SDVR, refused to prepare the needed documentation. It turned out that Stanislava Aleksieva had filed a report against him for missing work for a few days. She also explained to him that she would do everything to prevent this reassignment. In his signal to the Interior Minister, the man claims there is a recording of this conversation with Aleksieva. Either way, the move to the GDBOP did not happen.
To date, the “rebel” is still an investigating police officer at the 4th District Police Precinct. The first hearing in the case against the “mother-in-law” is already scheduled, while the Interior Ministry remains silent.
And the whole story still reeks, unbearably.
***
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- 25 September 2020 - Part I
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