EU Commissioner Georgieva's Past, Family Ties Questioned in Think-Tank Report

Politics » DIPLOMACY | October 18, 2016, Tuesday // 14:46
Bulgaria: EU Commissioner Georgieva's Past, Family Ties Questioned in Think-Tank Report File photo, EPA/BGNES

 

EU Commission Vice President Kristalina Georgieva was an informant with the State Security (DS), the Soviet-era intelligence and counter-intelligence services of Bulgaria, according to a publication by the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

The text, which claims to be the result of a month-long investigation, comes weeks after the eleventh-hour nomination of Georgieva as Bulgaria's official candidate for the UN Secretary General office.

Another allegation explored is that her family has ties to a conglomerate named Multigrup, considered by a former US ambassador, according to a 2011 Wikileaks cable, as "formerly the largest organized crime group in Bulgaria".

The author, Yves Kugelmann, quotes a former State Security officer - who wished to remain anonymous - as saying Georgieva was recruited as an informant before heading to London for post-doctoral studies in 1987.

His testimony was allegedly corroborated by a former professor and mentor of Georgieva at the University of National and World Economy (which was named Karl Marx Institute during the Cold War), who enumerates colleagues she had worked closer together with and who later all rose to prominence in society.

Allegedly, her objective abroad was to penetrate "academic circles in Western universities".

It should be noted that Georgieva has never been exposed as a former agent and has repeatedly denied claims.

Georgieva "was intelligent, hard-working, and came from “the right family”: her father, a construction engineer, was not a visible Politburo member or Communist “prince”, but a loyal apparatchik who had joined an underground Communist cell in the Royal Army prior to 1944, and had gone on to become head of the Road Construction Department."

"Too often, both the United Nations and the European Union have appointed leadership figures without vetting them, let alone subjecting the process to public scrutiny."

The full text, called A Major Blunder at the UN Narrowly Averted is available here.

 

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Tags: Kristalina Georgieva, Multigrup, EU Commission, State Security, DS

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