Bulgaria Now podcast: The long arm of the law, a fistful of euro, and fingerprints too

This week, two years to the day that Bulgarian law enforcement swooped on customs officers at the Lesovo border checkpoint with Turkey and made numerous arrests in connection with alleged corruption, the same thing happened again.

At this writing, a handful of the customs officers held in the November 2 2016 bust remain in custody.

This was one of the largest-scale anti-corruption operations involving the arrest of customs officers or Border Police in recent months and years, but not a few people have noticed that rarely is anything heard about follow-up prosecutions and sentences. Reports on November 3 said that there were some officers on duty who had been arrested two or three times.

Apart from those who were fingered by the long arm of the law, fingers were in the news in Bulgaria, with a hiccough at hospitals as a new fingerprint-based identification system for admission for medical treatment broke down the third day after it was introduced.

Bulgaria Now’s Lance Nelson and The Sofia Globe’s Clive Leviev-Sawyer mull over these tales in our latest podcast (with accompanying video), not without the presence of Felix the cat, who has his own views on the follies of humankind.

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The Sofia Globe staff

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