The week: A road tragedy

Given that long delay and the non-stop tear of the smaller road, it was obvious that some maintenance and signalization were necessary. Yet nothing happened, again. In a report in 2022 - 3 years ago, the Road Agency said "the situation is medium to worse". Since roads don't magically repair over time It has naturally deteriorated further. Nobody bothered to do even minor works. There weren't enough measures taken to reduce speed, maintain control or anything else to at least try and save lives. The police says it notified the Road Agency of the problem. Everyone collectively shrugs shoulders.

There is a state Agency of Road Safety, but it is powerless to sanction either the Road Agency, or the police. All these institutions effectively act and behave more like think tanks, not like responsible actors in a high-stakes field.

This is not by malfunction, but by design. Hapless institutions enable corruption and embezzlement. The primary role of the Road Agency isn't to maintain roads - it's to supply an endless cash flow to politically connected companies, who pass it on to their overlords. A salient fact to support that statement: 9 out of 27 local divisions of the Agency don't have a single engineer in their crew. Let that sink in - the divisions supposedly overseeing the road infrastructure don't have people qualified enough to do it. Why? Because that is not what they are expected to do.

As for the police, its primary role seems to be not to catch wrongdoers and maintain general safety, but to cover up evidence. Witness last week's huge scandal with a leaked chat between members of a division battling organized crime. They notice strange behavior and follow a van to a storehouse where they witness a contraband operation and the unloading of a huge number of cigarettes. They notify their command and want to go in and bust the operation. Their command does everything they can to stop them and, finally, someone obviously notifies the contrabandists as they try to get away.

And don't even get me started on that black hole - the prosecution. So the courts and the verdicts on the actual wrong-doers on the road are a small part of a large problem. Yet it is a start. After all, in Serbia protests for a faulty railway station led to a million people on the streets of Belgrade. You just never know.

Politics this week:

In a first sign that the capital is actually getting pricier and the property market is off balance, Sofia Municipality will attempt to construct housing for those in need - something that has been stalled for decades. "Sofia Municipality can be an active investor in the property market, to build its own buildings and rent out the municipal housing in them. This may sound like space technology against the background of the reality we inhabit. But since municipalities such as Skopje, Belgrade and Bucharest can have an active housing policy, I cannot imagine that Sofia Municipality does not have such capacity," Save Sofia leader Boris Bonev said this week.

The draft project's aim is to provide affordable housing for socially vulnerable groups that have a real need for accommodation. This means that municipal housing is seen as an element of the social policy and not so much of its economic policy, although it is generally acknowledged that it also has the potential to generate revenue to fill holes in the budget.

How many?

Hard to tell - there is not even an estimate of how many people need social housing in Sofia. And after the last ranking for municipal housing at the end of March, there are hundreds of people waiting. It is estimated that those in need are in the tens of thousands - many don't even try to apply.

Peevski's liberals turn conservative

Delyan Peevski's MRF-New Beginning - which was kicked out of the liberal ALDE alliance earlier last year (when they realized with three years' delay that it is being captured by an oligarch sanctioned for corruption) - has been welcomed by the conservative and nationalists alliance in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). It will sit next to other famous liberals like Hungary's Fidesz of Victor Orban, who also switched ideologies, albeit a few decades earlier than Peevski.

Economy:

While almost everyone has witnessed or participated in it, the informal (or "gray") economy is difficult to measure because it is by definition hidden. Yet there is no shortage of attempts in this direction. According to a new study published this week, the informal economy in Bulgaria has reached 34.6% of GDP, or around 64 billion levs in 2023, making the country the one with the largest informal sector in the entire EU. The study was prepared by the US consultancy Kearney in cooperation with Prof. Friedrich Schneider from Johannes Kepler University in Linz on behalf of Visa.

⅓ bigger

The numbers practically mean that if all undocumented activities were to come to light, the Bulgarian economy would be about a third larger. And more - if the country manages to shrink its share of the informal economy to the size of that in Greece, where it is 22%, it would increase GDP by 20 billion levs a year and tax collections by over 6 billion levs. It is questionable if there is the political will and administrative capacity to do so, however.

Industry slows down

In February 2025, Bulgaria's Industrial Production Index registered a year-on-year decline of 4.6%, accompanied by a 0.7% decrease compared to the previous month. The most significant annual downturn was observed in the manufacturing sector, which contracted by 7.1%. Within this segment, the sharpest declines were recorded in the production of basic metals (down 36%), textiles and textile products (down 23.6%), and paper, cardboard, and related products (down 19.3%). The mining and quarrying industry saw a modest decrease of 1.8%, whereas the production of electricity, heat, and gas increased by 11.2%.

Car parts and cigarettes

Despite the overall decline, certain industries posted strong growth on an annual basis. The production of transport equipment (excluding automobiles) surged by 54.6%, while the tobacco products segment expanded by 37.5%.

And as usual, construction

Construction Production Index rose by 7.4% year-on-year in February and edged up by 0.2% compared to the previous month.

Figures

The rise in residential property prices in Bulgaria in the fourth quarter of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, according to data from the National Statistical Institute (NSI). This marks the highest year-on-year quarterly increase since 2008.

500 million levs

The Bulgarian government managed to raise another half billion in three-year government securities to cover its ambitious financial needs for 2025.

Business:

Online grocery retailer fulfilled a record 100,000 orders in March, generating 13 million levs in revenue for the month-a 47.57% increase compared to the same period in 2024. According to company data, the platform also recorded a strong double-digit sales growth of 44.32% for the entire first quarter of 2025. During this period, 50,000 households reportedly shifted their regular weekly shopping to the platform.

Telecoms

Telecommunications and IT services provider Neterra has announced it is now an official distributor of SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service in Bulgaria. Starlink delivers high-speed, low-latency internet through satellites positioned in low Earth orbit. According to Neterra, the pricing of standard Starlink services will remain unchanged. The company expects key interest from clients in the financial sector, IT companies, and businesses involved in transport and logistics.

Entrepreneurship

The entrepreneurial organization is looking for participants for the seventh edition of its accelerator program Dare2Scale. Until April 30, companies from Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania with a market-validated product or service that is already generating revenue can apply for it on Endeavor's website.

BEAM

The fintech company listed on the BEAM growth market of the Bulgarian Stock Exchange (BSE), raised a total of EUR 8 million from its third bond issue. The issues were placed privately among more than 100 institutional and individual investors, with interest exceeding the proposed volume by nearly EUR 1 million.

Watch out for:

The legendary high-jump athlete follows in the footsteps of the now-disgraced former chief of football Union Borislav Mihaylov who clung to power come hell or high water. Kostadinova is the long-standing chief of the Olympic committee, but after a new chair was elected last month, she did everything possible to delay the transfer of power. There are now 8 appeals against the procedure, even though it was transparent and open to the public. Kostadinova has denied entry into the offices of the Committee to the new chair - Olympic gold medalist Vesela Lecheva.

Arch. Bogdana Panayotova

Is another candidate who can't enter her new position - of Sofia's chief architect. Panayotova passed the competition for the position yet "Save Sofia", who are part of the mayor's coalition, are calling for the dismissal of the candidate because of "economic dependencies".

Sam Barnett

has been appointed the new Chief Executive Officer of Central European Media Enterprises (CME), the media company that owns bTV Media Group. In the initial phase of his tenure, Barnett will concentrate on CME's two largest markets-Czech Republic and Romania. Meanwhile, bTV Media Group, along with CME's media operations in Slovenia, Slovakia, and Croatia, will continue to be overseen by interim Deputy CEO Klára Brachtlová.

Institutions:

This highly effective institution is proving its worth. In 2024 it confiscated assets worth 3.37 million levs, according to its annual report. The figure reflects the value of property seized following final court rulings (despite the Commission filing claims totaling over 20 million levs for the year). This is 4 times less than the annual budget of KONPI - totaling 14.2 million levs of taxpayer money.

Location

The Council of Ministers approved on Wednesday the increase of the capital of Terem Holding LTD - the conglomerate of military repair factories under the Ministry of Defence, by 17.6 million levs. The money will be used for the renovation of Terem - Ivaylo, the Veliko Tarnovo enterprise of the holding, where the new Stryker combat vehicles for the needs of the land forces of Bulgaria's army ought to be assembled after they are produced by the Canadian General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS) as soon as the end of this summer. Bulgaria ordered about 200 units for 2.5 billion levs in 2023 and Terem has the ambition to assemble the vehicles and even serve as a regional maintenance hub for the Strykers - Bulgarian and foreign alike.

Zen of the week:

Source: Ivan Mundov

You know at least several famous stories of cleaners disposing of famous works of modern art that they don't recognize as well, works of art. Now Bulgaria has its own example, as workers at the National History Museum cleaned up the "Border flowers" project of painter Ivan Mundov from the grounds of the museum after thinking that this is simply trash, likely blown from the wind. They weren't exactly wrong - it was trash, or - to be precise - waste found by the author on the Bulgarian-Turkish border.