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Three Bulgarian nationals have been found guilty of spying for Russia at the Old Bailey in London, in a trial that police described as one of the most significant espionage cases to be brought in Britain in decades.
Katrin Ivanova, 33, Vanya Gaberova, 30, and Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, were each convicted of one count of conspiracy to spy on Friday.
Ivanova was also found guilty on a charge of possessing false identity documents with improper intent after more than 30 hours of deliberation by the jury.
Prosecutors had said the trio were part of a spy ring that operated between 2020 and 2023 under the direction of former Wirecard chief operating officer Jan Marsalek, acting under the name Rupert Ticz.
Marsalek is believed to have been recruited by Russian intelligence in 2014, and fled to Moscow after the payments group’s fraudulent activity was exposed in 2020.
Telegram messages shown to the court suggested that Marsalek — who did not face charges himself — was giving the Bulgarian group assignments on behalf of Russia’s military intelligence and domestic intelligence agencies.
Marsalek handed down orders from his Russian bosses to the ringleader of the group, Orlin Roussev, 46, who managed its activities from his house in Great Yarmouth, the court was told. Roussev and Biser Dzhambazov, 43, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to spy before the start of the trial.
Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police’s SO15 counterterrorism command, said before the verdict that tracking down the spy ring had involved one of the biggest espionage investigations he had seen in more than two decades of counterterrorism work.
“This was spying on an almost industrial scale on behalf of the Russian state,” he told reporters, describing the group as a “serious threat”.
This is a developing story
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