The fatal ride was Savtsjo Vekilski’s monthly outing with Svetovrachene’s retirement club “Pleasure.” In depopulated Bulgarian villages, where young people have left for the city or abroad, it is these kinds of companies that bring some life to the brewery. For widower and former metal worker Vekilski, 80, the choir of the local senior citizens’ association was “his lust and his life,” says his daughter Galina Zlatanovska. “Besides him and the accordionist, the choir consisted only of women. My father never missed a rehearsal, every Monday and Thursday he had to go there to practice folk songs. And about once a month to a festival to perform.”
On that bright Saturday morning, August 25, 2018, he was up early. He had packed his costume: a black waistcoat with gold trim and a red sash. He had boarded the bus with Grigor Grigorov in the village square. Driver Grigorov drove the pensioners club to all their festivities. Thirty people made the trip in his blue bus with pink curtains.
Twenty would not survive the return journey. After the weather turned during the afternoon, the bus ran off the road near the town of Svoge and plunged into a 20-meter-deep abyss. “We still had hope that he would only be injured,” Zlatanovska says at her kitchen table. She dabs her incipient tears with a napkin. At night she heard from the mayor that her father had died instantly.
In Bulgaria come every year between six and seven hundred people to get into traffic. That is 90 per million inhabitants. By way of comparison: in the Netherlands the figure is 34. In the EU, relatively more people die on the road only in Romania. But the “crash of Svoge,” as the accident became nationally infamous, is more than a statistic. The revelations have shown that not only the driving behavior of the bus driver and the weather conditions played a role, but that negligence due to hand-clapping, nepotism and corruption was probably the main cause.
“We are dying of corruption on our roads,” said Bogdan Milchev, director of an NGO that specializes in road safety. Even before the bus crashed into the canyon in 2018, his organization had written a report on how dangerous exactly that part of the mountain road along the Iskar River was. Milchev had sent it to the Road Infrastructure Agency (API), the procurer and supervisor of roads, the responsible ministry and then Prime Minister Bojko Borisov. Road users and residents of Svoge complained, local authorities had sounded the alarm. Previously there had been fatalities and injuries.
Asphalt as glass
After the disaster, investigative journalist Valya Ahtsjieva revealed, investigations into the road had been conducted within the agency itself. She still has the four crumpled A4 pages that a source leaked to her at the time. The road was unsafely slippery, narrow and steep, you can read. The guardrail, lighting and traffic signs were not in order. “There is no drainage,” it says firmly. Ahchieva: “Instead of solving this, it was swept under the rug. There is a facade of supervision, but it can be bought off.”
The biggest scandal was that the road surface itself did not meet the – according to experts already limited – Bulgarian safety requirements. During a technical investigation prohibited amounts of limestone were found in the top layer of the asphalt. Limestone is cheap, but illegal in high concentration because it wears out too quickly and becomes slippery. Then tires lose their grip. Like building a wall with toothpaste. “That bend was made of glass instead of asphalt,” said Hristo Botev, the lawyer for the bus driver, who survived the accident.
For many Bulgarians, the revelations confirmed how much corruption endemic in road construction must have played a role. There were protests. Against Trace, Bulgaria’s largest construction company, which renovated the road but left a lot of work behind. And hired the boss’s son’s lab to certify the quality of the road surface.
But demonstrations also targeted the government. To the agency that had condoned the flaws on the ramp. Against the system of private tenders for infrastructure, pre-financed with billions of – often European – taxpayer money. And against politicians who are only too happy to open new avenues for television cameras, but who seem to find their safety irrelevant. “The whole system is riddled with corruption: shady deals, bribes,” said journalist Ahchieva. “Through the Svoge crash, Bulgarians realized that not only are they stolen from them, but that it costs lives.”
The revelations and protests had an effect: several ministers resigned and the – politically controlled – Public Prosecution Service expanded the criminal investigation into the bus driver with four employees from Trace and three supervisors from API.
For a moment it seemed as if Svoge would mean to Bulgaria what Colectiv was to Romania. The fire at a Bucharest nightclub that killed 64 people in 2015 was exacerbated by inadequate insulation and oversight of safety regulations. Half of the young victims died in hospitals where disinfectants had been tampered with. The tragedy opened a cesspool of corruption and forced the then prime minister to resign.
trainers
But in Bulgaria, after the tumultuous late summer of 2018, things went quiet again. The road at Svoge was immediately resurfaced. The maximum speed has been reduced to 30 kilometers. There’s a new, sturdier guardrail, but the crumpled one the bus tipped over is still on the verge. The twenty names of the victims are chiseled into a white stone. Freight traffic thunders past through the Balkan Mountains, en route to the capital Sofia, an hour south.
But there has been no real investigation into corruption and private payments in road construction. Nobody knows where the money for the original road has gone. The case against the regulators was tacitly dropped in the summer. Shortly before that, the court in Sofia had shot so many holes in the investigation into the other suspects that the Public Prosecution Service has to do its homework again. No one knows if it will ever come to a trial. The company, the regulator and the ministry do not want to ask “ongoing investigation” reply. The bus driver only through his lawyer. “The goal seems to be: to train until people have forgotten,” says Ahtsjieva.
But for at least twenty families, actually all of Svetovrachene (more than two thousand inhabitants), the matter is not forgotten. Only: they hardly dare to talk about it. Galina Zlatanovska does, but she lives with her family in Sofia and only spends the summers in the village. The mayor says he has no telephone numbers for relatives. “Some have now also died, others do not live here,” says Svetla Nikolova, in the otherwise deserted town hall. And: “The next of kin can blame anyone.”
Retirement Club Fun is giving up. Knocking on relatives’ doors leads to difficult conversations that are cut off as soon as the word corruption or guilt is mentioned. A skinny 55-year-old woman in green socks and worn-out slippers hesitates to talk to a journalist. She lost her husband in the disaster, broke her jaw and all her cervical vertebrae. She is disappointed, she says, on a street full of deep holes. “People can fly through space, but we don’t have proper roads.” But corruption, negligence perhaps? “I don’t know anything about that. I can’t tell if someone did something on purpose. I get nothing in return.” She shrugs.
The next morning, the woman, very emotional, calls and begs for her name to be kept out of the newspaper. Why? She can’t explain that.
village-omertà
Corruption to some Bulgarians is like water to fish: so obvious that they don’t realize it’s there. Or is there more to it?
Justice researcher Alexander Todorov, who is much involved in corruption, sees it as an omertà, a code of silence, in a village where work often goes through the door and pensions and benefits are distributed in cash. “Poor, older people also depend on politicians.” This is how far the ‘mafia state of Bulgaria’ reaches, he says.
Elections are held in Bulgaria on Sunday. The interim cabinet, which has ruled since May, has issued several scandals from the previous government, including in road construction. Money intended for the construction and repair of infrastructure disappeared in ghost businesses and was “smuggled out of the country in bags,” the interior minister recently announced.
He himself regularly calls on OLAF, the Brussels office for fraud protection, to delve deeper into Bulgarian cases. “Without much result.”
Galina Zlatanovska hopes for justice, but is not very confident that it will come, even with a new political wind. “We live in a beautiful country with good laws and regulations. But no one adheres to them and no one enforces them. If the state already does not fulfill its obligations, how are we supposed to know in which pockets the money disappears?”
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