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The European Prosecutor's Office announced that it has prevented fraud for 400 thousand euros from the EU budget in Plovdiv.

This is the second announcement today for an investigation by the EU prosecutor's office in our country.

A manager of a wine company from Plovdiv has been convicted of this attempted fraud related to the export of wine outside the EU, the statement said.

The convict submitted false documents with the application for funding and received a suspended sentence of one year of imprisonment with a three-year probation period and a fine of BGN 2,000.

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This is the first verdict in an investigation by the European Prosecutor's Office in Bulgaria, the statement said.

In March 2020, the company applied for a 390,452-euro subsidy from the EU under the national support program in the field of wine production to support the export of its wines to Russia, Belarus and Vietnam from 2021 to 2023.

In order to meet the requirements for receiving financial assistance, everyone had to submit three comparable independent proposals to the State Fund "Agriculture" (SFA).

During the inspections, the SFA established that forged signatures were placed in submitted documents and other inconsistencies with the rules were found.

The SFA submitted the data to the prosecutor's office and the Sofia City Prosecutor's Office initiated pre-trial proceedings.

The EU prosecutor's office later took over the case.

The defendant pleaded guilty and entered into an agreement with EU prosecutors, approved by the Specialized Criminal Court.

effective sentence

European Public Prosecutor's Office