An open letter from our Client to the Bulgarian Parliament

Тo the Hon. Ms Anna Aleksandrova
To the Members of the Committee on Legal Questions

Ma’am
Honorable Members of Parliament

National Assembly of the Republic of Bulgaria
National Assembly Square № 2
Sofia 1000, Bulgaria

Date: 13.01.2021

I am the holder of the Bulgarian Permanent Residency as investor under the art. 25, para.
1, p. 6 of the Law on Foreigners in the Republic of Bulgaria.
Recently I applied for the Bulgarian Citizenship under provisions of art. 14а, para. 1of
the Law on Bulgarian Citizenship (“… е увеличило инвестицията си при същите
условия на закона до стойност най-малко 2 млн. лв…”).

I strongly feel that those provisions of the Bulgarian Citizenship Law, that allow for the
investments in the Bulgarian Government Bonds, should be preserved in the new version
of the Law.

Let me give you some background to better understand my reasoning. I was born in
Belarus and moved to the United States in 1989, where I made pretty successful career as
Principal Embedded Systems Engineer, consulting companies like Adobe, Apple,
Microsoft, Samsung, Altigen, Maxim Integrated, Oppo, Xiaomi etc. I am proud to say
that many current cellpones in your pocket carry part of my work.

All my 4 children are US Citizens, and almost every summer we all would spend our
holidays in Europe. My children all graduated from US colleges (Stanford, UC Berkeley,
William and Mary, Boston University), and that was not an accident, that at some point 3
of them were also living and working in Europe (Italy, France, UK).

I will be retiring pretty soon, so I started to plan where I would like to live during
retirement. After careful considerations and consultations with lawyers from Malta,
Cyprus, Germany, Austria, Latvia I decided to apply for permanent residency in Bulgaria,
and later on – for Bulgarian Citizenship.

Because I am not a professional investor, I feel much more confident and comfortable to
invest more than 2 000 000 Leva in Bulgarian Government Bonds, and not into real estate
or priority investment projects. The Bulgarian Government Bonds are guaranteed by the
full faith and credit of the Bulgarian State. And that is very reassuring, especially when
you plan for the retirement.

I’m not that familiar with the priority investment projects and their backing, but in all my
dealings with the Bulgarian Investment Agency, that handles the investments, I have only
very high praise for their transparency, effectiveness and quick response.

Our family traveled to Bulgaria multiple times, and we all liked the country and it’s
people, so we decided to establish non-profit family foundation in Bulgaria, and one of
my daughters, who is a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience, and at that time was
working for Airbus Industries, currently chairs it.

I think that we made a good choice in selecting Bulgaria as the future home for our
children and as a nice place to retire for us.

Very respectfully,
Oleg Sherbakov