New executive director appointed to lead Bulgarian Sports Totalizator
Minister for youth and sports, Dimitar Iliev, has announced the appointment of three new members to the Sports Totalizator board.
Bulgaria.- The minister for youth and sports, Dimitar Iliev, has announced the appointment of Georgi Tarlekov as executive director and management board chair of the state gambling operator, the Bulgarian Sports Totalizator. Tarlekov replaces Angel Angelov, who had been appointed a year ago.
Iliev said that Tarlekov will remain in the position until a competition is held. Two other members of the board have also been dismissed and replaced by Rada Gyonova and Petar Peychev. Tarlekov is a financier with master’s degrees in management and marketing, banking and finance. He was previously an adviser to Minister Iliev on financial issues.
The minister said the change is intended to improve the Bulgarian Sports Totalizator’s development and optimisation in a bid to generate more revenues for sports. He said that the state company had not been used fully and efficiently and that the executive director’s pay had been disproportionately high for an employee of a state-owned enterprise.
Board remuneration will now be reduced, while the minister aims to achieve fairer remuneration for regular employees. There have been allegations of unjustified dismissals of long-term personnel and complaints about salary policies and lack of internal controls.
The board was appointed following a fast-track competition in the final days of the previous caretaker government. Iliev says he wants the management of the Bulgarian Sports Totalizator “to act much more decisively, with a clear vision and goals, aimed at achieving better results and significantly higher revenues for sports funds”.
Bulgaria’s new AML unit
A new unit will enforce anti-money laundering measures among gambling operators in Bulgaria. The unit will be overseen by the National Revenue Agency (NRA), which took over responsibility for gambling regulation in 2020.
The dedicated AML unit will monitor gambling operations, transactions and customers that are flagged as suspicious and will share information with international authorities. It will enforce requirements on customer verification, documentation and money laundering and terrorist financing risk assessments.
The creation of the new unit comes as Bulgaria seeks to raise standards following a critical national money laundering risk assessment in 2020 and the risk of greylisting by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Moneyval, the European Union AML watchdog, signalled the gambling sector as an AML risk in a report in May last year, noting challenges from organised crime and corruption and limited government resources.
The FATF is due to update its grey list of untrustworthy financial jurisdictions in October. Gibraltar and the Philippines remain on the list while Malta was removed last year after having been added in 2021.
