Reforming Bulgaria’s Anti‑corruption Authorities

Executive summary

In 2023, Bulgaria’s Anti-Corruption Law divided the former anti-corruption agency, the Commission for Anti-Corruption and Illegal Asset Forfeiture (CACIAF), into two new bodies, the Commission for Anti-Corruption (CAC) and the Commission for Illegal Asset Forfeiture (CIAF). The intention was to create more specialised anti-corruption institutions to provide these new agencies with a stronger mandate and clearer responsibilities, and, ultimately, to strengthen Bulgaria’s institutional capacity for combatting corruption. To support the new anti-corruption agencies, this report draws lessons from the development and implementation of the CACIAF’s 2022-2024 Strategic Plan that the CAC and CIAF can apply in their own strategic and operational planning. It also analyses Bulgaria’s legal and institutional framework for recovering and managing illegally acquired assets and makes recommendations for improving this framework.

Strategic planning

The first section of this report assesses the development and implementation of the CACIAF’s Strategic Plan 2022-2024 against the OECD Recommendation on Public Integrity and international best practices. In particular, the report finds that, even though the development of the CACIAF’s Strategic Plan was based on the priorities set out in the National Anti-Corruption Strategy, the CACIAF could have used its significant collection of available data to strengthen problem analysis and objective setting. Furthermore, the CACIAF could have ensured stronger implementation through better co-ordination with key stakeholders to build transparency and gain buy-in for the CACIAF’s work. Greater efforts could have been made to implement the required internal integrity checks of CACIAF officials, thus mainstreaming integrity safeguards throughout the entire organisation. Similarly, networking among integrity inspectorates could have been enhanced to improve awareness, co-ordination, and implementation of integrity policies. For these efforts to be fruitful, the CAC must retain adequate funding to enable effective implementation of its remaining strategic objectives as the reporting period for the Strategic Plan comes to a close. This is all the more important given that, following the split of the CACIAF into two new authorities, the majority of the former authority’s budget was transferred to the CIAF. Finally, even though the implementation of the Strategic Plan was supported by a defined monitoring process, this process could have captured a wider range of information, including by incorporating clear and specific indicators to better assess the reasons behind the level of implementation achieved. 

Asset forfeiture

The second section of this report provides an overview of the current asset forfeiture system in Bulgaria. It briefly presents the legal framework for asset forfeiture, consisting of primary anti-corruption legislation, secondary regulations governing the forfeiture process and relevant court decisions, and the institutional actors for asset forfeiture. This section also reviews the challenges undermining the civil asset forfeiture system in Bulgaria, including structural differences between civil and criminal procedures, difficulties borne out of judicial interpretive decisions, and lack of effective international co-operation channels among key stakeholders in the national and international asset forfeiture system. The report finds that, following the split into two different intuitions, the CIAF must improve several areas of its operational tasks. First, CIAF does not have all necessary tools for the identification and tracing of assets, especially abroad. Therefore, it could consider taking legal and operational measures, such as setting up an electronic platform where financial institutions could upload documents requested by CIAF easily and securely, to improve its work in this area. CIAF could also consider improving electronic communication channels among authorities, along with ensuring the security of sensitive financial data. Furthermore, it could consider strengthening the co-ordination between CIAF and the Prosecutor’s Office by expanding the use of contact officers beyond specific cases and having periodic dedicated co-ordination meetings among contact officers. The ability to freeze assets is important for the success of any asset recovery system. Unfortunately, Bulgaria does not have legislation allowing CIAF to proactively freeze assets where it has a reasonable basis to suspect potential illegal activity. It could therefore move in this direction while including a register of persons subject to an asset freezing measure. Similarly, measures associated to the criminal procedure could be strengthened to make Bulgaria more efficient in its asset recovery system. For example, it could revise the regime of deadlines to allow pre-trial investigations to last longer than two months, thus reducing the need to request extensions. It could also grant CIAF the mandate to support the Prosecutor’s Office in certain aspects of the criminal confiscation procedure. Other legislative changes to overcome limitations of the current civil asset forfeiture procedure could include to better align the civil asset forfeiture procedure with the European Convention on Human Rights as well as introducing legislation to clarify the treatment of illegally acquired assets that have been sold or otherwise become “unavailable assets”.