EUalive, the European outlet directed by Georgi Gotev, has published an analysis titled “San Marino’s closed circuit,” arguing that two very different affairs — the thirteen-year-old Bacciocchi family dispute and the Starcom deal — rest on the same pattern: financial ties to Banca di San Marino, fragmented proceedings, and central contractual and accounting questions that were never examined on their merits.
The article speaks openly of a “cricca” — a clique — describing a dense web of professional, institutional and personal relationships in a jurisdiction of 34,000 people, where the same lawyers, the same judges and the same regulatory figures keep reappearing.
The piece has already been translated and picked up by San Marino outlets, which have in turn pointed out that EUalive is anything but neutral on the matter, being notoriously close to the Bulgarian investor.
**The Bacciocchi file.**
Drawing on a dossier compiled by one of the parties — not on any judicial finding — EUalive reconstructs a framework agreement signed in April 2011 with BSM Immobiliare, alongside a simultaneous acknowledgment of debt worth €6,596,200 that the party involved says he was unaware of for more than two years. What follows is a sequence of procedural obstacles: a fiscal registration requirement that blocked the decisive document from being submitted in court, a denied application for legal aid, constitutional objections repeatedly postponed, and finally — once that obstacle fell away in 2023 — a final judgment invoked on issues that, according to the dossier, no one had ever actually ruled on.
In 2025, a complaint backed by an accounting expert’s report was dismissed in under a month; the same ruling opened a defamation case against the person who had filed it.
**The Bulgarian front.** Here the facts are better known and more easily verified: in 2025 Starcom signed a preliminary agreement for 51% of BSM and paid a €15 million deposit. Then, in October 2025, the Central Bank rejected the share transfer, triggering a freeze on the funds and criminal proceedings.
Christov has since obtained the progressive release of the funds and filed an arbitration claim seeking at least €150 million. The trial’s first hearing is set for 29 October.
**The names that keep coming back.** This is the part that will sting the most: EUalive lists professionals and magistrates who appear in both files, including a prior professional relationship — predating one judge’s appointment to the bench — which the San Marino judiciary has already ruled insufficient grounds for recusal.
The lawyer named in the piece has rejected the accusations as false.
The outlet itself acknowledges the limits of its own reporting: neither the Bacciocchi dossier nor Christov’s public campaign proves criminal responsibility or demonstrates a conspiracy.
What remains is the article’s one genuinely political line: the author writes that, after a series of contacts, his impression is that San Marino’s media live in fear of the clique.
Written in English, for an audience well beyond the Titano, at a time when the EU Association Agreement dossier has already once been pulled from the ambassadors’ table at Bulgaria’s urging.
The simplest way to disprove the claim would have been not to talk about it.
The harder path is to open the files and respond on the merits. For now, the first option is winning out.
