The United States and Great Britain on Friday imposed new sanctions against eight Bulgarians accused of corruption, including two former ministers and an influential member of parliament, AFP reported.

“The US Department of the Treasury, in coordination with our British partners, today imposed sanctions on several high-ranking individuals (…) for their involvement in large-scale corruption in Bulgaria,” US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken wrote on Twitter.

“We are resolute,” he added, “in our fight against the systemic corruption that is undermining democratic institutions” in this impoverished Balkan country in the midst of a serious political crisis.

Among the targets of the attack is former finance minister Vladyslav Goranov, who was part of Boyko Borisov’s controversial government from 2014 to 2020.

According to the US Treasury Department, he is accused of using his position to favor “oligarchs”. Former Minister of Energy Rumen Ovcharov of the Socialist Party and two former directors of Bulgaria’s only Kozloduy nuclear power plant are suspected of “illegal activities” in connection with contracts with Moscow.

In its statement, the US State Department condemned Bulgaria’s “toxic dependence” on Russian energy.

The leader of the pro-Russian movement, Mykola Malinov, was also sanctioned for bribing a judge to obtain the right to travel to Russia. He was accused of espionage and banned from traveling.

The United States imposed financial sanctions and banned the entry of individuals and their families into the country.

This is the second time since June 2021 that Washington has applied the Magnitsky Act, passed in 2012, to Bulgarian citizens and organizations to combat international impunity.

On the list, MP Delyan Peevski, a former “media mogul”, is subject to British sanctions along with Vasyl Boykov, a billionaire who made his fortune in the gambling industry.

The US ambassador to Sofia, Herro Mustafa, recently complained that “none” of the individuals sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act are being prosecuted in Bulgaria.

“We saw that corruption undermined the functioning and control of some institutions,” she said.

Bulgaria, which is holding its fifth parliamentary vote in two years in early April, has failed to form a stable government and is in the midst of a political crisis unprecedented since the fall of communism in 1989.