Bulgaria makes corruption pledge

“We accept all the comments made, we have reached similar conclusions ourselves,” Boyko Borissov, prime minister, said.
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The commission commended Mr Borissov’s right-of-centre government for its “strong political will” to reform the judiciary but said that courts were not making enough convictions.

“Bulgaria has achieved a number of indictments regarding organised crime and high-level corruption…However, too few cases are concluded in court,” it said in an annual report on Bulgaria’s progress with meeting EU judicial standards, released on Tuesday.

The country should implement “a strategy to fight organised crime focusing on serious crime and money laundering as well as systematic confiscation of assets of criminals,” it said.

Police and prosecutors in the European Union’s poorest member-state have made some progress with cracking down on mafia groups that flourished under the previous socialist-led government, according to Tsvetan Tsvetanov, the interior minister.

But the judiciary has lagged behind, Mr Tsvetanov said.

“Our judicial system doesn’t meet the needs of society and of an EU member-state,” he said.

Judges are criticised by prosecutors for dismissing cases on technicalities and showing leniency towards members of organised crime groups.

The commission underlined that Bulgaria’s judiciary “should take the initiative more often and show a stronger sense of responsibility”.

Mr Borissov said that special courts would be set up to try organised crime cases from next January in an effort to achieve more convictions. He said new legislation would be drafted to improve public procurement procedures.

“We will focus on developing the “political will” we were praised for in the report….We are going to take more action in the coming next weeks and months,” Mr Borissov, a former senior police officer, said.

The Commission report said that 60 per cent of tenders in Bulgaria showed irregularities, “while this rate reaches 100 per cent for large public infrastructure projects”.

However, the Commission has unfrozen hundreds of millions of euros in EU funds allocated to Bulgaria, which had been blocked because of fraudulent practices and corruption among senior officials responsible for disbursing funds.

The report said: ”Severe sentences were pronounced, but not yet enforced, in a case involving large-scale fraud of EU funds.”

Mario Nikolov, a Bulgarian businessman, was sentenced in May to 12 years in prison on charges of fraud and embezzling €7.5m from a pre-accession funding programme for Bulgaria.

Mr Nikolov was also convicted of money-laundering in a related case and received an eight-year sentence. The case came to court following an investigation by Olaf, the EU’s anti-fraud squad.