A luxury hotel in Velingrad. A husky young man rents a room. He travels with a retinue of helpers. A van with dark-tinted windows is parked in front of the hotel. Over the next few days hotel guests see the same scene play out time and again: the man receives a long procession of visitors. After a brief verbal exchange, each visitor steps into the van and leaves it with a bag. The bags—some smaller, others bulkier—are full of money. Each man throws the bag over his shoulder and heads back whence he came.
This sounds like the beginning of a cheap thriller, but it isn’t. This is an episode from the true story of the largest bank failure in Bulgaria, a tale of corruption involving the highest levels of power. The bank failure cost the Bulgarian taxpayer 4.22 billion Bulgarian levs, which, if translated to the size of the US economy, would amount to nearly one trillion dollars.
The KTB State is the result of a two-year investigation by a team of journalists into the suspicious transformation of the Corporate Commercial Bank (KTB) from a small and insignificant player in the Bulgarian banking system into the fourth-largest bank in the country. The book also explores the scale of the bankruptcy and its impact on the Bulgarian economy and provides, for the first time, incontrovertible evidence of political corruption in Bulgaria.
The investigative work, carried out under the KTBfiles project with ABF support, involved more than 250 meetings with different sources, approximately 30,000 pages of documents (reports, contracts, correspondence, lists, registers, financial records, etc.) put under close scrutiny, more than 1,000 phone calls, and at least 50 applications for access to information.
The KTB State in Bulgarian came out last year, and an English translation is now available at http://www.ktbfiles.com/ktb-state-book/
