Only a few top public officials, inherited by the new Government, managed to keep their jobs in the first three weeks of Prime Minister Boiko Borissov’s term as the opposition accused GERB of wielding the big broom.

On July 14, Stoyan Mavrodiev, an MP from Borissov’s GERB party and one of his key economic experts, said that GERB, which won the biggest share of votes at the elections, will not simply replace public officials for political reasons but will analyse the functions and the qualities of the staff according to methods applied in the private sector where most of GERB’s experts originated.

"If someone has qualities, a good education and efficiency, he or she has nothing to worry about," Mavrodiev told Bulgarian Focus news agency. "People who lack all these things have reasons for concern," he noted.

Two weeks later it would appear that a number of top officials had fallen into the latter category, according to Mavrodiev’s criteria at any rate. One of the first public officials to go was Yanko Yankov, head of the National Road Infrastructure Agency (NRIA), sacked on July 31.

The reasons were the "lack of synchronisation and communication with representatives of the European Commission, exaggerated payments to outside consultants, inadmissible actions concerning NRIA’s spending in a time of crisis, the lack of an adequate quality control and management system [...] and the inability to meet targets and deadlines."

He was replaced by Dimitar Ivanov, who was the head of the agency in August-October 2008.

The most senior dismissal was that of of Petko Sertov, head of the State Agency for National Security, who was sent to a diplomatic post in Thessaloniki. Borissov thanked him for his work but said that he wanted to streamline the agency’s work and "raise its authority" after it had failed to produce substantial results in the fight against top level corruption while becoming embroiled in several big rows about tapping the phones of MPs and journalists.

Sertov was replaced by Tsvetlin Yovchev whose first action was to dismiss all of Sertov’s advisers including the controversial Alexei Petrov, often linked by the media to Bulgaria’s underworld.

Another change affected the Customs Agency, often blamed for not doing enough to close contraband channels. Here Finance Minister Simeon Dyankov replaced Hristo Koulishev with former Interior Ministry top official Vanyo Tanov. Borissov is entrusting Tanov personally with ending smuggling and the abuse of excise duties and bringing about transparency and co-operation with non-governmental organisations to verify reported agency violations cited in the media. Koulishev, on the other hand, told the media he felt offended by the reason for his dismissal which was "lack of motivation".

Next on the list was Stefan Yuroukov, head of the State Forestry Agency. On August 7 he became the first of the dismissed public officials to be charged by prosecutors for his alleged involvement in a land swap deal with forestry. The deal was part of a broader criminal activity, a government media statement said. He was replaced by Georgi Kostov.

Another dismissal, that of Alizan Yahova, head of the State Agriculture Fund, was hardly a surprise. Yahova had been appointed by Ahmed Dogan, leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedom party, which was part of the previous ruling coalition. During the election campaign Dogan had cited Yahova as an example of his personal "instruments of power" as a way to control the flow of money into the state. Another reason was the fact that the EC had frozen 140 million euro of funding to Bulgaria in 2008 under its Sapard programme, which is managed by the Agriculture Fund.