Bulgarian Govt Axes Head of Troubled State Railways BDZ - Report

BDZ head Pencho Popov (pictured) has been axed by the Transport Ministry. Photo by BGNES

The CEO of the Bulgarian State Railways BDZ Pencho Popov has been sacked by the Transport Ministry, according to unconfirmed reports.

Popov has been replaced with Yordan Nedev, according to anonymous government sources, cited by the Dnevnik daily. The report has not been confirmed by the Transport Ministry.

Pencho Popov was appointed CEO of BDZ back in October 2009, shortly after the new center-right government of the GERB party took over, by then Transport Minister Alexander Tsvetkov. (Tsvetkov himself resigned in May 2011 and was replaced by his deputy Ivaylo Moskovski.)

Popov was appointed after BDZ's previous CEO Hristo Monov was fired for large-scale abuses and embezzlement.

The new BDZ head Yordan Nedev has never worked at the BDZ, according to Dnevnik. He works for the MMD Partners consultancy, and has employment history at German consultancy Roland Berger in Bulgaria where he worked on the privatization of Bulgarian companies. He used to be the CEO of investor.bg. He has degrees from Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski and London Business School.

Bulgaria's state-owned passenger railway operator BDZ has been traditionally in horrendous financial condition in the past 20 years. At present, it hopes to get a loan of BGN 460 M, plus a loan of BGN 160 M for the National Company "Railway Infrastructure", from the World Bank for badly needed reforms.

However, the reform attempts have been countered by the trade unions as they threatened to lead to massive layoffs of the state-employed railway workers. Thus, in March 2011, the government was forced by an imminent railway strike to back out of some of its reform plans.

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