2021-01-15

SOFIA - Excessive water cuts to its consumers, questionable management of tendering procedures, constant increase in water prices in the face of significant leaking of its outdated infrastructures. These features of a global water giant, repeatedly singled out by the press, are no longer a secret in France. 

Elsewhere, however, other countries are paying a high price for the privatization of water by the French brand. In Bulgaria too, Veolia has exported its practices - with its usual share of drifts.

Do these drifts constitute a well-thought system ? A “Veolia” system allowing large benefits to the company based on this list of features ? Upon uncovering this story, the journalists make a parallel between the case of the company’s operation in the city of Sofia through Sofiyska Voda and over well known scandals involving the company in France as well as in other europeans countries. 

The specificity here seems to the lie in a potential breach of the Bulgarian public procurement framework by the company through one of its subsidaries: SADE France. But also in the unsettling attribution of other procurements to Burgargeomin ltd, the infamous company at the center of a state scandal in Bulgaria for the hijicking of a Libyan tanker in 2018 and owned by Tsvetan Tsanev, former intelligence officer during the soviet era and linked with the mafia organization Cosa Nostra.

Photo: Bastamag.net 
 

Team members

Alexandre Brutelle

Alexandre Brutelle is a foreign reporter and freelance investigative journalist.

Alexandre Brutelle

Marin Nikolov

Marin Nikolov is a TV journalist, based in Sofia, Bulgaria. 

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