The week: And justice for all?

Back in November, several parties appealed the election results to the Constitutional Court, which was not so surprising, since those were the most troublesome elections in the modern history of Bulgaria. The Court unprecedentedly decided to probe the results of thousands of sections, order a recount, and figure out whether the original numbers stacked up.

It took 4 months, but the Court reached a decision. This Thursday, the election of 17 MPs was declared void and the Central Electoral Committee now has to recount the vote in more than 2000 sections and announce new results.

There were several big problems with the ballots. First, approximately 780 ballots from 7 of the polling stations audited by the court were missing. In two of these polling stations, no ballots were found at all, while in the remaining five, either the paper ballots or the machine voting receipts were missing.

According to sources of "Kapital", when the experts appointed by the Constitutional Court requested the ballot bags from the local administrations for the respective polling stations, they instead received bags filled with office supplies, printouts of sections from the Election Code, scraps of paper with calculations, rough drafts, and other unrelated materials. That's a crime.

But there's more. There were various sections, where it was obvious that one person was filling all the ballots, or where votes had been cast directly on the ballot pad, as the pressure from marking the "X" had imprinted onto the next ballot as well. In many of those cases, the main beneficiary was Delyan Peevski's MRF-New Beginning party.

Now to the implications.

As a result of that decision, most likely Parliament will probably have to admit another party - the pro-Russian, nationalistic Greatness, founded by the mastermind of a Ponzi-scheme. That's not such a problem for the ruling majority, as they will still be a vote or two above the needed majority, or will get their votes from Peevski. In fact, he is now officially part of the ruling majority, closing entirely the circle we've tried to break out from 4 years ago.

But the second, more important conclusion is that the election process, and especially the counting of votes, is a total and utter mess and no one until now has looked into it. As one expert explained, what is happening is that vote-buying has switched from ordinary voters to electoral committees, which are bought up wholesale. That's a major problem for democracy and voter confidence. Unless we change something or task the CC with looking into every other election, this problem is not going away. So the message was: our democracy is ultimately broken.

And last, but not least, the onslaught on the messenger

Shortly before the decision was announced, the CC was suddenly the target of a coordinated attack. This began with an absurd investigation into the case by the Sofia prosecution service. They requested all the documents from the state-owned "Information Services" and even tried to request the Court to hand them anything they had. The CC doesn't answer to the Prosecution and it has no legal power to request anything from it. The goal was obviously to block the decision, as everyone knows that once a case goes to the Prosecution, it effectively disappears into a black hole.

Things got so ugly that the President of the Constitutional Court, Pavlina Panova, made a statement on national television, explicitly declaring that other state institutions were sabotaging the Court.

That was followed by a two-day parliamentary campaign to discredit the court where the parliamentary majority of GERB, TISP, BSP, and Delyan Peevski passed a special declaration against the "lack of transparency" (the irony) "The shadowy interests are attempting to consume the entire state, and at stake is our very existence as a democracy," stated President Rumen Radev.

This was obviously because parties knew as early as twenty days ago the results of the recount. This arrogant manner of both "lawmakers" and "law-abiding" institutions suggests that someone is whipping both from behind. And there may be another, even more sinister goal, as stated by the lawyer and human rights activist Mihail Ekemdzhiev. That is "to create a traumatic institutional memory, deterring the Constitutional Court from ever again ordering a review of election results" and leaving undisturbed those "who, for decades, have been accustomed to distorting the will of the electorate". Quite a chilling thought.

Politics this week:

Even if Bulgaria's democracy is crumbling, there's still good news. On Wednesday, it was announced that one of the six new EU artificial intelligence (AI) factories will be in Bulgaria. The country won a 90 million euro funding project called BRAIN++, implemented by Sofia Tech Park and the Institute for Computing and Artificial Intelligence (INSAIT). The other AI factories will be in Austria, France, Germany, Poland and Slovenia.

Vazrazhdane tries to sabotage the 2025 budget

While most proposals were fillers, some were surprisingly impactful.

But, no.

Vazrazhdane's plan to sabotage the budget and block Bulgaria's euro adoption failed. Parliament's Budget Commission declared all their proposals void, probably not using AI to go through them all. Spare a thought for the clerk's office in parliament, which has to process the whole paperwork.

Economy:

Bulgaria will get just over 1 billion levs of EU funds for a highway between Ruse and Veliko Tarnovo and a tunnel under Shipka. The changes are part of the European Transport Connectivity Programme 2021-2027, adopted on Wednesday by the Council of Ministers. This money covers only half the project costs, and Bulgaria hasn't even submitted the projects to Brussels yet.

The highway to the Danube city is important for both Bulgaria and Romania, a spokesman for the Romanian road agency told Capital. But we are not moving very fast there, unfortunately. A contract signed in 2022 has barely moved, and construction has begun on a very small part of the road.

P.S: No money for train to Skopje

Meanwhile, EU funding for the railway from Sofia to Pernik and Radomir is canceled, jeopardizing the key EU Corridor 8 initiative.

Ryanair: Lower airport fees, get a billion

The low-cost airline wants to boost its fleet in Bulgaria from 4 to 10, passenger numbers from 3 million to 6 million, and routes from 43 to 100, announced Ryanair's Chief Commercial Officer Jason McGuinness at a press conference in Sofia, outlining his expansion plans for the next six years. The catch is that the carrier wants the Bulgarian government to lower airport charges, which they say are blocking tourism growth. The airline estimates that basing 10 aircraft is a USD 1 billion investment.

Figure

is the real growth of the Bulgarian economy in 2024, data from the National Statistical Institute show, which is above the preliminary forecasts of the BNB, the European Commission, and the Ministry of Finance.

2.5%

is the decrease of exports in February compared to a year earlier, amounting to 6.2 billion levs. The main factor was lower exports to non-EU countries, while sales within the bloc rose slightly.

Business:

The copper mining company, which is part of the Geotechmin group, will continue to operate until at least 2041 and invest up to 1.2 billion levs after the government decided on Wednesday to extend its concession right. The current contract expires in 2031, but because of proven additional reserves the company will be able to mine copper ore for another 10 years after that.

Startup

There will probably be no money for startups from the Fund of Funds this year as a ruling by the Commission for the Protection of Competition issued a harsh decision that could potentially block the formation of two of the funds controlling a total of 100 million euro for years to come.

Energy:

The National Electric Company (NEK) has once again extended the deadline for bids to repair part of the Chaira Hydro Power Plant. The new CEO, Georgi Dobrev, is now accepting applications until March 24th. It seems nobody wants the job, as this is the third attempt to find a willing bidder. Maybe the increased tender price of 242.5 million levs (excl. VAT) will entice someone to finally fix the plant's key facilities, which collapsed several years ago.

Watch out for:

The main contenders for the long-vacant post of ombudsman. Stankov is the former Minister of Justice in the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha cabinet (there was such a time, not that long ago, yes) and has been nominated by the non-profit Bulgarian School of Politics Dimitry Panitza Association. Former GERB MP Gemma Grozdanova, who later became a founding member of the renegade Tsvetan Tsvetanov's party, is supported by several NGOs related to children's and patients' rights. To be honest, it seems to us that being in GERB is a bit like being a member of the Habsburg dynasty: sooner or later you're going to pop up at one of the estates.

Nikola Minchev

The WCC European deputy, part of the Renew family, has not been very active since he went to Brussels. Yet he still managed to get in the news this week, because his assistant Adam Mouchtar's office was sealed by the authorities in Belgium, in connection with a new bribery scandal around the Chinese conglomerate Huawei. Minchev claims he has nothing to do with the scandal and distanced himself from his associate.

Location:

Source: Capital weekly

The 8th dwarves

Just like a neverending story, the long-gone mythical restaurant that was the scene of a huge investigation by the Anti-Corruption Fund in 2020 keeps resurfacing. A leaked video from the shady back office of disgraced prosecutor Petyo Petrov-The Euro has surfaced, and it allegedly features European Prosecutor Theodora Georgieva (who's also constantly popping up in our newsletter lately) discussing a "done deal. The insinuation? Georgieva's nomination was orchestrated by the very corrupt forces she's now supposed to be fighting. The real takeaway? There's an endless supply of dirt ready to be dug up on anyone who dares to disrupt the status quo.

Company:

The French company has been selected to deliver 35 trains for 883 million levs. Yes, the same trains we've been trying to buy for quite some time. The European Commission has confirmed that the trains delivered by August 2026 will be financed under the Recovery Plan, with the remainder to be paid for from budget funds. For now, that is.

Institution:

BNB

One of the rarely considered aspects of the transition towards the euro in Bulgaria is the cessation of the outgoing Bulgarian currency - the lev. A sense of the scale of the operation comes from the recently announced auction by the National Bank (BNB), which seeks a buyer for about 7,744,450 kg of scrap, representing demonetized Bulgarian coins of base metals and alloys. Currently, about 52 tonnes are available and about 7,700 tonnes are to be withdrawn from circulation. Distributed in boxes according to the specification provided in the advertisement, this represents about 3,000 cubic meters of metal, which is 44 standard 40-foot containers, or more than an entire Olympic swimming pool filled to the brim.