Behind the mountain lodge execution lies a devastating audit: Official documents reveal how former Green Party co-chair and environment minister Borislav Sandov bypassed state lawyers to empower a private group—before spending years rewriting his own story.

The Petrohan mountain pass cuts a bleak, winding trench through the Western Balkan range, shrouded in thick beech forests and dense fog. For years, travelers knew it only as a treacherous mountain highway. Today, it stands as the epicenter of Bulgaria’s most explosive political and criminal scandal in decades—a saga involving an execution-style triple murder, an armed self-styled “ranger” patrol, and a former deputy prime minister now facing criminal prosecution for misconduct in office.

The central figure is Borislav Sandov. To Western diplomats and international environmental forums, Sandov was long seen as a respectable, pro-European reformer. A longtime leader of the Bulgarian Green movement (Zelenite) and co-leader of the reformist Democratic Bulgaria coalition, he ascended to power in late 2021 as Deputy Prime Minister for Climate Policies and Minister of Environment and Water in Kiril Petkov’s short-lived reformist administration. Yet, beneath his reputation as an eco-conscious technocrat lies a paper trail that has led state prosecutors directly to his door.

As uncovered in an exhaustive investigation by the Free Information Channel (SIK), Sandov’s political legacy has unraveled against hard institutional records. On September 18, 2026, Sofia City Prosecutors formally charged him under Article 282 of the Criminal Code for malfeasance in office. The core of the accusation: while serving as environment minister on February 8, 2022, Sandov bypassed mandatory administrative oversight to ink an unlawful framework agreement with a shadowy, newly formed outfit calling itself the “National Agency for Protected Areas Control” (NAKZT). Under the pretext of environmental activism, this private group effectively usurped state policing functions over vast mountain tracts, using ministerial authority as an official shield.

Four years later, the compound was engulfed in violence. When police breached the isolated mountain lodge near the summit, they found three men shot dead. The horror instantly focused public scrutiny on how the private entity operating the compound had acquired its authority. As the Free Information Channel (SIK) established through official ministerial audits, archival records, and Sandov’s own evolving media appearances, the former minister’s public defense has steadily collapsed under the weight of documented reality.

To an international observer, Sandov’s initial public reaction seemed decisive. Appearing on television in February 2026, he moved swiftly to distance himself from the dead men and their organization. He insisted on air that he had never known the men behind the group prior to 2022, that they were neither colleagues nor party allies, and that the agreement signed at his desk was legally meaningless—a harmless gesture equivalent to “a handshake in front of the press cameras” carrying no legal rights, no financial obligations, and zero state delegation of power. In Sandov’s framing, he had simply signed an innocuous piece of paper to foster civic signals, only to find himself dragged into a bizarre conspiracy.

However, the internal audit dossier compiled by the Ministry of Environment and Water (MOEW), obtained and analyzed by SIK, paints a profoundly different reality.

Far from a symbolic press handshake, the actual legal text of the February 8, 2022 memorandum explicitly granted the private association “support in exercising regulatory and supervisory control,” acknowledged their operational resources for “conducting systematic control and prevention,” and formalized cooperation in “exercising monitoring and enforcement within protected zones.” In the institutional vocabulary of European administrative law, “regulatory and supervisory functions” are sovereign prerogatives of the state, reserved exclusively for sworn civil servants, state foresters, and accredited park rangers.

Even more damning are the bureaucratic findings of the Ministry’s Inspectorate. Under Bulgarian administrative procedure, any legal pact signed by a minister must be drafted by competent legal directorates, scrutinized by ministry attorneys, and registered in a transparent departmental docket. In the case of Sandov’s agreement with NAKZT, the ministerial audit established that not a single statutory directorate within the Ministry of Environment was consulted, informed, or allowed to review the text. The draft never underwent the mandatory legal vetting for constitutionality and administrative feasibility. In interviews, Sandov casually brushed this off by stating: “There was no need for clearance with lawyers; my team drafted it, and I helped write it.”

What Sandov called “my team” was not the civil service, but his insular political cabinet. Acting on his sole authority, the minister signed a sovereign-sounding document alongside Ivaylo Ivanov—a man representing an entity incorporated barely one month earlier, with zero institutional track record, no audited credentials, and no physical verification of their operational capacity.

By the summer of 2022, the Petkov cabinet had collapsed, and Sandov was out of office. What followed destroys his narrative that the agreement was viewed across government as harmless. The succeeding caretaker leadership at the Ministry realized with alarm that private vigilantes armed with badges, radios, and official-looking credentials were operating in the mountain reserves, invoking the authority of the Environment Ministry. In September 2022, ministerial leadership summoned Ivaylo Ivanov to unilaterally terminate the memorandum. Ivanov flatly refused.

Faced with private actors citing a minister’s signature, the state had to resort to formal legal combat: MOEW served NAKZT with an official notary notice, ordering them to immediately cease all operations citing the Ministry’s name, declaring the agreement null and void, and referring the group’s leadership to both the Ministry of Interior and the Sofia City Prosecutor’s Office for criminal usurpation of authority. If the document was indeed “nothing more than a handshake,” as Sandov claimed, one central question remains unanswered: why did the Bulgarian state have to deploy notarized cease-and-desist orders and notify police authorities to stop the group from executing state powers?

The deeper SIK traced Sandov’s personal statements across the months, the wider the fissures became. The contradictions were not ideological; they were chronological, documented by his own voice on record.

First was the question of acquaintance. Having maintained early on that he never knew the figures behind the group before the signing, Sandov subsequently admitted on live television that prior to signing the document, he had held three separate meetings in the Ministry with Ivanov to negotiate and write the agreement. One does not draft operational policy documents over three rounds of closed-door sessions with people one “does not know.”

Second, and perhaps most damaging to his credibility, was the narrative surrounding his presence at the isolated Petrohan lodge itself.

In February 2026, speaking to national broadcasters BNT and bTV, Sandov justified his knowledge of the facility by claiming he had visited the lodge in 2022 on a quasi-official inspection: he went, he said, “to personally ensure that their work was not fictitious” and to verify whether their compound was suitable for training state park rangers.

Yet seven months later, in a lengthy interview published on September 21, 2026, Sandov’s account transformed entirely. Pressed on the exact timing of that first visit, he admitted he had never set foot in the lodge while serving as minister. His first trip, he now explained, occurred in late August or early September 2022—after he was already an ex-minister, campaigning as a parliamentary candidate for the Montana district. Driving over the pass, he casually decided to pull over, telling himself: “Let me see this famous lodge I’ve only seen in photos.” He portrayed the visit as an impromptu stop for tea on the porch.

The two versions cannot logically coexist. An official administrative site inspection to verify state ranger training equipment cannot be simultaneously dismissed as an informal tea break taken by an unemployed politician passing through the mountains.

Furthermore, Sandov’s public claims of emotional and professional detachment have crumbled. While consistently insisting that the group were “never friends or associates,” he was eventually forced to admit that following his initial visit, he returned to the lodge in both 2023 and 2024 with his family—staying overnight as personal guests of the men who would later meet their violent ends. In the realm of public ethics, the boundary between professional detachment and overnight family retreats at an unaccredited paramilitary post is not an abstract nuance.

Now, the legal reality has caught up with the political theater. Sofia City Prosecutors are building their indictment around allegations that Sandov’s deliberate circumvention of administrative law granted the association a de facto monopoly and tangible legal benefit over pristine state land. While Sandov continues to wage a media campaign claiming he has received no formal subpoena and denying that the Ministry owned land in the sector, the institutional files leave little room for maneuver.

The tragedy of Petrohan is no longer merely a local homicide investigation. It stands as an indictment of high-level Bulgarian governance: a tale of how an internationally celebrated Green politician turned a major state department into a personal fiefdom, bypassing institutional checks and balances to empower a shadowy private clique. As the courts prepare to hear the indictment, one conclusion drawn by the Free Information Channel is already beyond dispute: the blood on the mountain pass was preceded by an ink-and-paper abdication of state authority, signed in the heart of the Bulgarian government.