Police and prosecutors detained 10 people in a joint raid at St George University Hospital in Plovdiv. Investigators say an organised criminal group drained the health insurance fund through fake hospital admissions.

Those taken in include the dean of the medical faculty, Prof Mariela Geneva-Popova. There is no information that charges have been brought against her or any of the other detainees.

Officers and prosecutors carried out 40 searches in all. Besides St George, they went into other medical centres in Plovdiv and Karlovo and searched an address in Krichim.

Police and prosecutors are expected to give details of the operation on 6 October. It should then become clear which of the detainees will be charged, how the scheme worked and how much money the fund lost.

Former health minister Prof Hristo Hinkov discussed the investigation on a TV programme. He was also deputy director of the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF). Hinkov said the fund has become a very good political piggy bank and that politicians want to control the huge sums built up in the system.

Hinkov said the fund spends everything it collects. In his view, the money should not sit there like money in a bank but go on treating people, because people pay their contributions into it.

The former minister believes the sector has no real reforms and that Bulgarian healthcare is not ready for the next crisis at all. He pointed to the Covid pandemic, when hospitals were not ready to separate healthy patients from infected ones.