By Aleksandar Vasovic
BELGRADE (Reuters) - Tsvetan Vassilev, the majority owner of Bulgaria's troubled Corporate Commercial Bank (Corpbank), surrendered on Tuesday to police in Serbia on an international arrest warrant for embezzlement, a senior source at Serbia's interior ministry said.
Corpbank (BB:6C9) has been at the centre of Bulgaria's worst banking crisis since the 1990s, after a run on deposits in June prompted the central bank to seize the lender, the country's fourth biggest, and close its operations.
The ministry source, who declined to be named, told Reuters that Vassilev surrendered in Belgrade. "All appropriate procedures are under way," he said, without elaborating.
Vassilev, locked in a public feud with a rival at the time of the run on Corpbank, has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and blamed the deposit run on a plot hatched by his competitors.
Serbian police and interior ministry officials were not immediately available to officially confirm the report. Vassilev's lawyers were also not answering their phones.
The prosecutor's office in Bulgaria said they had no official information on Vassilev's whereabouts or whether he had surrendered to Serbian police.
"If that be the case, a Serbian court is the only authority to rule on whether to extradite him," a spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office said. A Bulgarian court on Friday rejected a motion from Vassilev to have the arrest warrant lifted.
Vienna-based advisory firm EPIC, acting for Corpbank's main shareholders and potential investors, is seeking to start work with the central bank this week on a rescue plan for the bank, shut since June 20.
EPIC has said it represents Vassilev, who owns 50.6 percent of the bank, as well as an Omani sovereign wealth fund with a 30 percent stake and VTB Capital, controlled by Russia's VTB Bank, with about 9 percent.
Efforts to put together a rescue plan have become bogged down pending October elections, and analysts say no solution is likely before a new parliament is set up.
Meanwhile depositors are keeping up protests demanding access to their funds and the resignation of the central bank's management.
The central bank said on Monday it wanted to start talks with major Corpbank shareholders as soon as possible and that the finance ministry would have to approve any state aid.
(Additional reporting by Tsvetelia Tsolova in Sofia; Writing by Matt Robinson; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)