Sofia (awp / afp) – He is not in the courtroom but his name is in everyone’s mind: Evelin Banev, a Bulgarian drug baron, is at the heart of a long-term lawsuit from the bank Credit Swiss.
The Swiss group, judged alongside other defendants, is implicated for not having been able to prevent a vast money laundering operation.
The debates, scheduled to last several weeks, opened on February 7 before the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona (south-east).
Known by the nicknames of Brendo, Igor, B or Nonno, the 57-year-old former wrestler is conspicuously absent.
If he is not targeted by the prosecution, the Swiss prosecution points, in a 500-page indictment, to his role as head of the network.
Targeted by an Interpol red notice, the “king of cocaine” is wanted by Bulgaria, Italy and Romania, where he was sentenced to prison terms.
On the run since 2018, he was arrested last September in Ukraine but quickly released by the authorities of this country whose nationality he acquired.
From tennis to the bank
Evelin Banev was asked by the court to intervene by videoconference by the end of February. His lawyer in Sofia, contacted by AFP, declined to comment.
On the benches are former athletes who left Bulgaria after the fall of communism in 1989 to join Switzerland.
One, 60, is a childhood friend of “Brendo” and his alleged “strawman”.
Both wrestled at the same club. In the early 1990s, “many wrestlers were approached by mafia clans after losing state support” as a source of income, explains the prosecution.
The other is a former tennis champion, once ranked 69th in the world, and manager of Credit Suisse at the time.
This 49-year-old woman is accused of having “agreed to carry out operations intended to conceal the criminal origin of the funds” without making the necessary “clarifications”.
The investigators have identified acts between 2004 and 2008 involving “more than 146 million Swiss francs” (138 million euros), but only the facts that occurred after February 2007 are examined for reasons of prescription.
The bank said it “unreservedly rejects as unfounded all the accusations (…) in this case inherited from the past”, saying it is “convinced of the innocence of its former collaborator”.
Before the Court, the latter, “destroyed by 13 years of instruction”, gave free rein to “his anger”, recounted Me Grégoire Mangeat. “The existence of a suspicion of illicit origin of the funds has always been totally disputed,” he told AFP, denouncing “absolute shame and sadness”.
Murders and kidnapping
Bundles of banknotes transported by road to Switzerland, or transfers of money from offshore accounts: “Brendo” has set up “a veritable legal and economic conglomerate made up of more than 200 companies”, underline the prosecutors.
The laundered funds were then invested in Bulgaria, notably in the construction of residential complexes and luxury hotels on the Black Sea coast.
According to the investigation, the drug baron enjoyed contacts at the highest level of the state, against a background of endemic corruption.
His life has everything of a novel: endowed according to Bulgarian justice with multiple passports, for example from Venezuela or under the identity of a boy who died in Morocco in the 1970s, “he acts on the world stage”, analyzes Tihomir Bezlov, an expert in organized crime.
With “the confidence, apparently, of the South American cartels”, he is suspected “of having sold his goods in some of the largest markets – Italy and Spain”, adds the expert, over a course marred by numerous acts of violence.
The trial thus evoked the murder of Konstantin Dishliev, one of his partners who was a client of Credit Suisse and was killed in May 2005. The latter’s mother was also shot in 2008, when she was preparing to testify.
Evelin Banev himself received a dramatic warning when his then 10-year-old daughter was kidnapped in March 2013 outside his home. She was released 47 days later against payment of a ransom under mysterious conditions.
afp/jh