Spas G. Kostov

Spas G. Kostov serves as Chairman of the Supervisory Board of EL Engineering Industrial Holdings. He joined the group in January 2025 as Group Chief Investment Officer, directing capital allocation and governance across an industrial platform spanning Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, before assuming the chairmanship in 2026. In that period he has led more than ten transactions — from origination through integration — across industrials, infrastructure, energy, and regulated markets, in more than ten jurisdictions.

His approach rests on three disciplines applied to a single underwriting standard: an investor’s read on risk-adjusted return, a lawyer’s rigor on structure and precedent, and an operator’s accountability for what happens after close. That standard was formed on the legal and regulatory workstreams of two landmark cross-border transactions — Thermo Fisher Scientific’s approximately US$20.9 billion acquisition of PPD, completed in December 2021, and United Group’s approximately €1.5 billion acquisition of VIVACOM — and tested across more than forty cross-border M&A, private equity, and structured-capital mandates since 2019.

The through-line of his career is the conviction that structure is strategy: the quality of a transaction’s legal architecture, the clarity of its governance, and the alignment of its parties determine value long before markets do. It is a conviction formed in ministry negotiating rooms, proven on billion-euro acquisition workstreams, and now applied to every capital allocation the Supervisory Board oversees.

Before EL Engineering, Mr. Kostov was Global Legal Counsel to Thermo Fisher Scientific and PPD, Corporate Legal Counsel to VIVACOM, General Counsel to Chemax Pharma, and Senior Legal Counsel to Bulgaria’s Ministry of Agriculture and Food, where he spent close to seven years across legal, compliance, and institutional governance roles. He holds an LL.M. from Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, a Master’s degree in European Law and Politics from the Centre Européen Universitaire, and a Master’s degree in European and International Studies, European Union Law, from the Université de Lorraine. A qualified lawyer, he works in Bulgarian, English, German, and Russian.