'Bulgaria's last king loses battle for the right to the palace property.'

The former ruler and prime minister of Bulgaria, Simeon Saxoburggotski, has returned to the country 50 years after the monarchy was abolished. Simeon Borisov Saxoburggotski spent decades in exile in Egypt and Spain. Alamy.

The last king of Bulgaria has been defeated in a legal battle to reclaim a mountain palace and hunting grounds that were confiscated by the country's communist rulers when the monarchy was abolished 75 years ago. Simeon Saxoburgotski, who sat on the throne as Simeon II in 1943 at the age of 6, spent 50 years in Egypt and Spain after a 1946 referendum in which 90% of Bulgarians voted for a republic. The former monarch claims that a series of royal residences and forests should have been returned to his control''his family after a domestic court ruling in 1998 determined that the confiscations were discriminatory and violated the right to property.

The former tsar returned to Bulgaria in full in 2001 and now lives in the Vrana Palace on the outskirts of Sofia, a huge 2,000-square-meter complex surrounded by a botanical garden that the family donated to the state.

The dispute began to flare up after the king returned in 2001 to serve as prime minister for four years after launching a political party that promised to transform the country with radical economic ideas. But the problem re-emerged when he emerged from''s politics in 2009. Following attempts to evict Simeon II and his Spanish wife from Vrana, the former ruler told Bulgarian media in 2018: 'I feel humiliated. It's like the state is going to put me into exile again.".

The family's confiscated property included a two-story house in Sofia, four palaces, a hunting lodge and a thermal spa, which is now owned by the former tsar's older sister Maria-Luiza Borisova Hrobok, court documents show. The former tsar and his sister, German-Bulgarian citizens who now live in the United States, took the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

This week, a court in Strasbourg, France, unanimously rejected claims by former members of the royal family over two properties'