Bulgaria Arrests Citizenship-Selling Scam Suspects

At least 20 people were arrested on Monday for allegedly taking part in a corrupt scheme that streamlined the process of granting Bulgarian citizenship to foreigners, the Specialised Prosecution announced.

The operation to arrest the suspects in Sofia, Kyustendil and Pleven was initiated after four months of investigation on behalf of the Specialised Prosecution, which focuses on high-profile corruption cases, and the Commission for Illegal Assets Forfeiture, the country's newest anti-corruption body, Bulgarian National Radio reported.

The suspects taken into custody include the president of the Bulgarian State Agency for the Bulgarians Abroad, SABA, Petar Haralampiev, who was nominated to the post by the United Patriots nationalist coalition, which is part of the government of Bulgaria.

Also detained were other SABA staff, as well as middlemen who allegedly asked people from Macedonia, Ukraine and Moldova who did not have Bulgarian roots to pay a bribe to get them a certificate acknowledging their Bulgarian origins.

This certificate is the first necessary document on the path to gaining Bulgarian citizenship, but criteria on what constitutes Bulgarian heritage have been notoriously murky.

In the year to June 2018, close to 18,000 people - mostly from Macedonia (10,252), Ukraine (1,894), Albania (1,510), Serbia (1,013) and Moldova (851) - claimed Bulgarian heritage, Justice Minister of Tsetska Tsacheva told a press conference in June, according to Dnevnik.bg. Tsacheva said that almost 10,000 of these people were granted citizenship based on these documents.

A Ministry of Justice response to a parliamentary inquiry said that 116,000 people have received citizenship in the past 15 years, most of whom relied on the heritage...