Bulgaria Ex Interior Minister: Government Is Chaotic

Bulgaria's ex interior leader, Mihail Mikov, blames GERB government for driving the country into an even bigger crisis. Photo by BGNES

According to Bulgaria's former Interior Minister Mihail Mikov the Cabinet of the ruling GERB party has been “quite chaotic in its actions.”

In a Thursday TV appearance, Mikov said that the Bulgarian public has witnessed how the economic politics of PM Borisov's Cabinet has led to a “depletion of the budget” and has worsened Bulgaria's economic state.

According to Mikov, if GERB stays in power for another nine months, the crisis that has overtaken the country will become even bigger. Mikov accused the government of having spent BGN 2 B from the national reserve, “without asking anyone about it – quietly and on the sly.”

“In order to enforce a new austerity package, you must first do your homework and see which one of the anti-crisis measures of the previous government has worked well,” said Mikov and added that numbers will show which government has been more adept at ruling the country.

Bulgaria’s government is reported to have approved Tuesday a revised 2010 budget law that taps into the fiscal reserve as it battles recession and seeks for ways to fill in gaps.

According to unconfirmed reports, the fiscal reserve will slump from BGN 6.4 B to BGN 4.5 B at the end of the year, shows the revised budget that the government tabled in parliament and which local Sega daily has obtained.

Bulgaria operates in a currency board regime, under which the lev is pegged to the euro, and is obliged to keep a fiscal reserve. At the end of March it stood at BGN 6.3 B, flat month-on-month, and down from BGN 7.95 B in the same period a year ago, data showed.

Meanwhile, the European Commission released Wednesday its convergence report, concluding that Bulgaria and seven other EU member states do not yet meet all the conditions for the adoption of the euro.

The European Commission told Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark and Finland Wednesday that their budget deficits are too large, and set them under the so called “excessive deficit procedure,” special procedure under the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact to ensure that they will reduce swiftly their state spending.

The European Commission’s decision to place Bulgaria under the excessive deficit procedure has come a couple of weeks after the European Union's official statistics agency said the Bulgarian budget deficit in 2009 was wider than the government had estimated and exceeded the 3% ceiling.

Bulgaria's center-right government announced earlier in April a larger than expected 2009 deficit allegedly caused by unaccounted procurement deals, signed by the previous Socialist-led cabinet. The previously undiscovered expenses increased the 2009 gap to 3.7% of gross domestic product (GDP) from an initial 1.9% under the EU rules, the cabinet said.

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