“Belene is a totally corrupt deal and a failed project.”

These were the words of Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov in an interview with the popular Bulgarian station BTV back in 2014, when his second term in office was just starting.

He was referring to the Belene nuclear power plant project, on which construction had begun back in the 1980s, then was restarted in 2004.

The restart of construction has since cost Bulgarian taxpayers a little over 1.5 billion euros. But nothing has actually been built in the last decade bar the delivery of two 1060-MW VER-1000 reactors by the Russian state-owned Atomstroyexport following a three-year court arbitration process.