Bulgaria strips citizenship of sons of Yota founder Sergey Adoniev

The Bulgarian authorities deprived of citizenship two sons of the founder of the Yota company, Sergei Adoniev. About this with reference to the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice reported site of the “Bivol” investigation project.

The reason for the withdrawal of citizenship from Adoniev’s sons, according to Bivol, was the deprivation of citizenship from the businessman himself in 2018 after he was convicted in the United States of fraud. At the same time, the process was launched after the United States added Adoniev and his sons to the “Magnitsky list” in January 2023.

“The Bulgarian citizenship of the children of Sergei Adoniev has been withdrawn after verification of the grounds on which they were registered as Bulgarian citizens. <...> (The sons of a businessman) received Bulgarian passports when they were minors: in accordance with the law on Bulgarian citizenship, since both of their parents received Bulgarian citizenship,” the portal writes. The citizenship of his sons was canceled retroactively, writes the portal, so the withdrawal of documents coincided with the deprivation of citizenship of Adoniev himself. “The Ministry ordered the Municipality of Plovdiv to exclude them from the list of citizens of the Republic of Bulgaria. <...> The instructions were carried out on February 14, 2023. They (the children of Adoniyev) are not Bulgarian citizens,” Bivol quotes the clarification from the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice. At the same time, the wife of Sergei Adoniev, according to the portal, retained Bulgarian citizenship, since she was not convicted of crimes. Sergei Adoniev has been accused by the Ministry of Justice of concealing information about his criminal record. Sergey Adoniev is a Russian businessman, founder of the telecommunications company Scartel (Yota brand). In the ranking of the richest businessmen in Russia, according to Forbes, Adonyev ranks 193rd with a fortune of 550 million dollars. He acquired Bulgarian citizenship in 2008 "for particular merits" on the proposal of the head of the Ministry of Transport, the socialist Petr Mutafchiev. Then Adoniev founded a company in Plovdiv to invest in the economy of the country, but during all this time the investments, according to the Ministry of Justice of Bulgaria, would have amounted to approximately 50,000 leva - 25.3000 € . In 1996, Adoniev was charged in the United States with violating the trade embargo with Cuba and laundering money through the work of MCW Enterprises. The businessman was arrested in Germany, Adoniyev's British lawyer recommended that he plead guilty, after which the businessman was sentenced to 30 months in prison and a fine of 1 million dollars, but he actually paid four times as much. In 1999 Adoniyev was expelled from the United States and banned from returning to the country. Meanwhile, in 2001, a US court granted the businessman's request to have the indictment quashed.