These are some of the top stories in Bulgarian newspapers on  January 5 2009. The Sofia Echo has not verified these stories and cannot vouch for their accuracy.

Politics

Trud daily quotes sociologist Andrei Raichev as saying that the current senior partner in the ruling coalition, the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), will win the largest share of votes in the upcoming general elections for Parliament. According to Raichev, the right-wing parties will gather about 10 per cent in elections scheduled tO be held in the middle of the year with Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov's party GERB emerging in second place.

Economy

The Bulgarian economy will grow slower in 2009 than in 2008, economists told Dnevnik daily and not all sectors will feel the effects of the global economic crunch.

Construction in resorts will be severely hit. The housing, office and logistics segments, on the other hand, will suffer milder effects, said Georgi Ganev from the Centre for Liberal Strategies.

Segments of the processing industry, integrated into global production chains that are slipping into deep recession, could also face increasing problems, according to Ganev.

This year's gross world product will inch up a humble 2.1 per cent dragged by waning exports from emerging economies and the squeeze in global consumption, forecast Olivier Blanchard, economist at the International Monetary Fund.
In Bulgaria's financial sector, credit growth will slow to about 10 per cent, and a further slowdown is not out of the question, Ganev told Dnevnik.

Bulgarian banks amassed 1.318 billion leva in profit from January to November 2008, up 25.8 per cent from the same period in 2007, Dnevnik daily quoted Bulgarian National Bank data. The profit is expected to surge to 1.5 billion leva for the full 2008.

The number of companies filing claims against the state has grown considerably, according to Sega daily, which quotes data from the Finance Ministry. The claims amount to tens of millions of leva, according to Sega. Cancelled concession contracts and other tenders were among the main causes of complaints from companies, the daily says.

Social

Most dailies report about the road conditions in the country on the last day of the two week-long Christmas and New Year's Eve holidays when thousands of motor vehicles flooded the roads. The snowfall caused some traffic jams with trucks with summer tyres blocking the Trakiya highway and the Kulata-Sofia road for several hours on January 4 2009. Fortunately, the difficult road conditions did not lead to fatalities.