Workers on Hotel Veronika Site Ignored Safety Orders, Company Reps Say

The General Labor Inspectorate in Varna had no information on the upcoming destruction of hotel Veronika.

A tragic accident caused the death of one worker and left three people missing under the ruins on Wednesday.

The statement was made by the Press Office of the inspectorate. According to the information released, the building was owned by the International Fair in Plovdiv. The construction work was then appointed to the company Planeks OOD, which in turn hired a sub-contractor - Bultransport Group OOD.

Planeks OOD now needs to provide more documents and information on the exact type of activities performed on site.

Meanwhile, it turned out that Bultransport Group in its turn hired a sub-contractor to execute the demolition of the building but the name of the company remains unannounced.

Workers had been ordered not to enter the site around 4 pm on the day of the tragic accident, as supervisors noticed that the building had inclined. The warning was made by a Planeks representative.

According to a witness account, however, an unknown person ordered workers to continue the demolition manually despite the risk warning. Heavy machines had been used initially but they did not manage to complete the work.

Allegedly, the technical supervisor - a Bultransport Group OOD representative, opposed the order, but the workers went into the building anyway.

The Inspectorate has established that all the people inside the building during the accident did not have contracts with none of the companies involved in the hotel demolition. Additionally, some had went through the obligatory by law safety instruction session and some had not.