Fibank With a court order dated 4 May 2023, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York finally closed the so-called RICO case with ref. No. 1:18-cv-11072-GHW, which was a civil lawsuit initiated in 2018 by four Bulgarian persons against a number of individuals and reputable institutions such as the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB), which is the central bank of Bulgaria, the US-based Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon), which is the oldest bank in the USA and the largest custodian bank in the world, and Fibank (First Investment Bank), which is one of the leading banks in Bulgaria.
A year earlier, in 2022, the court dismissed the case against the mentioned institutions and certain individuals, including Fibank’s majority shareholders Mr. Ivaylo Mutafchiev and Mr. Tseko Minev, who were represented by Arnold & Porter, one of the largest global law firms headquartered in Washington, D.C. The court ruled that there was no legal basis for it to hear the asserted claims, including on the basis of plaintiffs' alleged conspiracy theories involving the United States.
Although the case was thus dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, in its detailed reasoning, the court made many observations which appear to also prove the lack of merit on the substantive level. For instance, the court considered that the allegations trying to link Fibank and its majority shareholders Ivaylo Mutafchiev and Tseko Minev to any wrongdoing associated with the first course of conduct are “insubstantial”. It also noted that there were “contradictions” in the allegations that are “unexplained” and “without a logical basis”. The Magistrate Judge also defined the claims as “futile” and noted that the specific allegations about Fibank’s alleged role in the first course of conduct (issuing loans and attempting to sell debt positions in those loans) “merely describe arms-length transactions”, are “particularly hollow” and “do not indicate fraud on the part of any of Fibank or its majority shareholders.
With this outcome, it seems that the matter has been resolved for good.