The Prosecution College of the Supreme Judicial Council (PC of the Supreme Judicial Council) initiated disciplinary proceedings against the prosecutor Dimitar Frantisek Petrov. Kalina Chapkanova, Svetlana Boshnakova and Ognyan Damyanov were elected members of the disciplinary committee.
In August i.f. the chief prosecutor Borislav Sarafov submitted a proposal to the SC of the Supreme Court to impose punishment on Dimitar Petrov for violations established during the inspection of his activities.
This is what Lex.bg says.
It was ordered by i.f. the chief prosecutor on the occasion of the arrest of TV producer Niko Tuparev. He was detained at the end of June and accused of official embezzlement of nearly 1.44 million BGN for a case from 2020. The supervising prosecutor turned out to be Dimitar Petrov. The court acquitted Tuparev, an investigation began against Petrov (see more here), and he himself was sent to the district prosecutor's office in Smolyan (see here).
The audit was carried out by a team of prosecutors from the Supreme Prosecutor's Office and the Appellate Prosecutor's Office-Sofia and covered the period from June 30, 2021 to June 28, 2024.
All pending pre-trial proceedings and files with which Petrov was involved, as well as suspended pre-trial proceedings which he supervised, were checked. The results showed that there was an unjustified delay in cases, a lack of rhythm and intensity in the execution of the procedural and investigative actions and of control over the investigating authorities for the lawful and timely conduct of the investigation, the prosecutor's office announced a month ago.
One of the findings in the report is that in a number of pre-trial proceedings, Petrov did not effectively manage and supervise the investigation. During the inspection of one of the cases, purposeful behavior of Dimitar Petrov was found to circumvent the requirement of the law for random distribution of files and cases. Subsequently, pre-trial proceedings were initiated, in which a defendant was brought in and he was detained for a period of up to 72 hours, without any grounds for this.
In another pre-trial proceeding (related to money laundering), procedural actions were carried out, which were the result of “extremely incorrect, tendentious and illegal assessment of facts and circumstances”, which led to the impossibility of taking certain lawful actions by another supervising prosecutor.
During the inspection, it was established that Petrov supervised 41 pre-trial proceedings, the investigation of which has not been completed. Some of them were found to be slow and irregular in the investigation led by Petrov in his capacity as a supervising prosecutor.
In 17 of the pre-trial proceedings, the rules for the timely preparation of a request for an extension of the investigation period were not followed, as in two of the proceedings, Petrov did not prepare a request for an extension of the investigation period at all, even though he was referred with such a proposal by the investigative body.
Petrov oversaw 83 suspended pre-trial proceedings. The inspection team found a number of violations committed – for example, in 41 of them, he did not request information from the police authorities about the operational-search measures undertaken and their results, or such information was requested only once.
In his proposal to impose punishment on Petrov, i.f. the attorney general has laid out the findings of the review team in 80 pages. In his letter to the SJC, Sarafov indicated that Dimitar Petrov's workload during the audited period was not excessive and did not constitute an obstacle to the conscientious performance of his official duties.