schema:articleBody
| - Bulgaria pressed Serbia on Wednesday to rule on a 2014 request to extradite a banker facing trial over the collapse of the country's fourth largest bank. In a letter to Belgrade's Higher Court, Chief Prosecutor Ivan Geshev said he was "bewildered" by the "unprecedented" wait around Bulgaria's request to extradite banker Tsvetan Vasilev. Vasilev, the former major shareholder of Corporate Commercial Bank (CCB), fled to Serbia in 2014. In his absence Bulgarian prosecutors charged him as a defendant in a major trial that opened in 2018. He was accused in the "massive embezzlement" of 2.6 billion leva (1.3 billion euros, $1.6 billion) from CCB between 2008 and 2014. Seventeen other defendants including bank executives, accountants, auditors -- even top central bank officials -- were also charged over the affair. Geshev said the bank's collapse had had "a huge impact on the economy and financial stability of our country". The indictment ran to 11,000 pages and the trial is still dragging on. The extradition case against Vasilev is currently blocked after being passed back and forth between Belgrade's Higher and Appeal Courts. Serbia is negotiating with the European Union to join the bloc and Geshev wrote to the EU, asking it to take into account the extradition delay in any "future considerations about Serbia's readiness as candidate to join the European Union and to implement the principle of rule of law in court procedures". Bulgaria, an EU-member state since 2007, has so far backed Belgrade's efforts to join the bloc. CCB was hit by a run on deposits in June 2014 after press reports said it had engaged in suspicious lending practices and was on the brink of bankruptcy. The turmoil has revived memories of Bulgaria's worst banking and financial crisis in the mid-1990s, when 14 banks went bankrupt. It also raised severe doubts about the central bank's ability to supervise the sector at a time when Bulgaria was already vying to join the eurozone. The affair forced central bank governor Ivan Iskrov to resign in 2015. ds/jza/jj/bp
|