Decidedly, the surgeons in Sofia have the scalpel that stutters. Last week the minister Bulgarian Minister of the Interior, Boïko Rashkov, had to improvise a press conference on gross violations of the law and good medical practice
at Lozenets University Hospital. From 2019 until April, Israeli, German and Omani patients received kidney transplants there in violation of the law.
False names and bogus certificates
This had been hardened in 2003, after the discovery of organ trafficking involving mafia networks and shady clinics in the Balkans: it requires that donors and recipients are relatives, by blood or marriage.
However, in this case, fourteen young Moldovan and Ukrainian donors have been identified, according to the Organized Crime Directorate. They were hospitalized under a false name and bogus certificates covered the transplants.
The management of the hospital was sacked. As had been, in 2005, the boss of the Sainte-Catherine University Hospital in Sofia, a German-Bulgarian spawn of the transplant. At the time, the Ministry of Health had identified twenty fraudulent transplants: no certificate of parentage, no notification to the Transplantation Agency, whose director had also jumped …
A kidney sold for € 3,400
Officially, the internal investigation had not found any trace of payments other than the € 15,000 invoiced to transplant recipients. The honor of public service was safe. Except… that a poor Russian, pinched at the airport, had indeed confessed to the sale of his kidney for € 3,400.
Everything had therefore changed so that nothing changes: Bulgaria keeps year after year at the head of the European corruption ranking.
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