Legal experts hired by the Bulgarian government to assess the legality of the return of the monarch's estates to Bulgaria's ex-Tsar, Simeon Saxe-Coburg, have pronounced that all but one of them have been unlawfully given back.

The check refers to the Vrana Palace (in which Simeon currently lives), as well as the Tsarska Bistritsa and Sitnyankovo Palaces, and a house in the village of Slatina. Of them, only the Slatina house is deemed to be correctly returned to the former monarch.

The legal analysis has been commissioned by the Bulgarian Ministry of Infrastructure and Regional Development. Legalists Prof. Vladimir Petrov and Lyubomir Denev, as well as legal firms Vladimir Donchev and Savova & Co. have been contracted.

Over the summer of 2010, Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha announced that he will sue the Bulgarian state over seizing back some of the properties of his family.

In the end of 2009 the Bulgarian Parliament voted to freeze the former Tsar's rights to lands in the Rila mountains, on grounds of information disclosed after an investigation at the Ministry of Agriculture, according to which the former monarch was granted more land than his family actually owned. Bulgarian courts have also found a number of errors and violations in the procedure for returning lands to Simeon.

The estates and forests were owned by the state after the former communist regime nationalized them in 1946 and forced Saxe-Coburg's family into exile.

The question of the so called "Tsar's estates" has become an issue disgruntling the Bulgarian society in the recent years over doubts that the property was given to Saxe-Coburg unlawfully during his term as Prime Minister (2001-2005).

Simeon II is the last monarch of Bulgaria, having reigned with regents 1943-1946 (aged 6-9), after the death of his father Boris III. After the communist takeover in 1944, a controversial referendum was held 1946, at which people voted in support for the creation of a republic, and this led to banishing the royal family from the country. In 1947 a new constitution was adopted proclaiming Bulgaria a republic.

Simeon returned to Bulgaria in 2001 and swiftly founded a liberal political party (National Movement Simeon II, later National Movement for Stability and Prosperity), which won a landslide victory in the general elections the same year.

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