Evelin Banev - Brendo filed a petition in the Sofia City Court requesting a general punishment for the sentences imposed on him in our country for money laundering both from Romania and Italy for cocaine trafficking. The case is about to be allocated to a judicial panel to hear it.
The first sentence that came into force was from a Romanian court in June 2017. With it, Evelin Banev was sentenced to 10 years and 6 months in prison for organizing the trafficking of one ton of cocaine. According to the facts stated in the court decision, some of the drugs were delivered to Bucharest even with a car owned by the Romanian police. The second sentence enters into force in April 2018. She is from the Bulgarian Supreme Court of Cassation, reports BNT.
Banev was sentenced to 6 years in prison for money laundering, the origin of which was drug trafficking. And the third is from an Italian court. It enters into force in November 2021 and for trafficking nearly 6 tons of cocaine in a period of one year. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, with the Italian authorities indicating that he should serve 19 years and 6 months. It is the serving of his sentences in Bulgaria and the possibility of their being combined into one common punishment that is considered one of the reasons for Brendo's surrender.
"It seems to me that the most realistic reason is that he is looking to solve his problem with the two sentences in Romania and Italy by trying to serve his sentences in Bulgaria, which are reduced sharply," said Tihomir Bezlov, Center for the Study of Democracy.
When determining a common penalty for the three sentences, the court should take the most severe sentence, i.e. the one from Italy of 20 years in prison. However, it is written in the law that the sentence cannot be higher than the maximum penalty for this crime provided for in our legislation - which is 15 years. What the court will decide remains to be seen, and it depends on the exact wording of the crime for which Banev was convicted in Milan.
"This move is hardly accidental, I suppose it is premeditated," explained Nadya Cholakova, an investigative journalist.
The second reason that may have forced Brendo to turn himself in to the authorities was a threat to his life after failing to deliver over 5 tons of cocaine within a year.
"On the one hand, there is talk of the 'Ndrangheta on the 20-year sentence "Cocaine kings". So they talk about how much money has gone through it, but also how many yachts have sunk. So with whom he entered into what complicated relationships. Personally, I'm on another version with Serbs. I wouldn't rule out Sreten Josic here," said Nadia Cholakova.
In the Spanish, Italian, French, Belgian and German services, there is operational data that literally until a month ago, Brendo continued to control a significant part of the supply of cocaine from Latin America to the shores of Europe. Just a week ago, a shipment of 35 tons worth more than 2.5 billion euros was detained in Germany. The message about this shipment came from the Colombian authorities and is believed to have been a message directly to Evelyn Banev.