Iliana Iotova

Iliana Iotova
Iliana Iotova
5th Vice President of Bulgaria
Incumbent
Assumed office 22 January 2017
President	Rumen Radev
Prime Minister	Boyko Borisov Ognyan Gerdzhikov (Acting) Boyko Borisov
Preceded by	Margarita Popova
Member of the European Parliament
In office 2007 – 16 January 2017
Personal details
Born	Iliana Malinova Iotova (1964-10-24) 24 October 1964 Sofia, Bulgaria
Political party	Bulgarian Socialist Party

Iliana Malinova Iotova (Bulgarian: Илияна Малинова Йотова^[1]) (born 24 October 1964) is the Vice President of Bulgaria. She was the running mate of Rumen Radev, who defeated GERB nominee Tsetska Tsacheva in the second round of the 2016 presidential election. She was a Member of the European Parliament from 2007 until her resignation on 16 January 2017. In the EP she sat on the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and was a substitute for the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. She also participated in the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament. She speaks Bulgarian, French and English.

Education

Born in Sofia, Iotova received a Master's degree in Bulgarian and French philology from the University of Sofia. She has specialized at the École nationale d'administration (ENA, National School of Administration) in Strasbourg, France, and the Center for European Studies (CEES) of the University of Strasbourg.

Early career

From 1990 to 1997, Iotova worked at Bulgarian National Television as a reporter, editor, director and presenter of news and current affairs programmes. She then worked as the director of the press service of the Bulgarian Socialist Party.^[2]

Political career

In the 2005 national elections, Iotova was elected to the National Assembly.

Iotova became a Member of the European Parliament in 2007 and was re-elected in 2014. There she is part of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats group.

Iotova has served on the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (2007-2009), the Committee on Fisheries (2009-2014) and the Committee on Petitions (2009-2014). From 2012 until 2013, she was also a member of the Special Committee on Organised Crime, Corruption and Money Laundering. Since the 2014 elections, she has since been serving as vice-chairwoman of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, under the leadership of chairman Claude Moraes. In this capacity, she was her parliamentary group’s rapporteur on a 2015 report calling for the equitable distribution of 40,000 refugees across the European Union.

In addition to her committee assignments, Iotova serves as chairwoman of the parliament’s delegation to the EU-Montenegro Stabilisation and Association Parliamentary Committee and as member of the delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean. She is also a member of the European Parliament Intergroup on Integrity (Transparency, Anti-Corruption and Organized Crime).^[3]

Ahead of Bulgaria's 2016 presidential elections, Iotova was officially nominated as the Bulgarian Socialist Party's running mate for presidential candidate Rumen Radev. After her election to the Vice Presidency, she resigned her MEP seat.

References

External links

• Personal profile of Iliana Iotova in the European Parliament's database of members
• Official website of Ilyana Iotova at the Wayback Machine (archived 10 January 2014)