Media reports of large-scale illegal trading in Bulgarian passports have prompted the country’s new Government to pledge a cleanup of the application system that it foresees having the spin-off benefit of applications being processed faster.

The Ministry of Justice says that about 60 000 applications are currently being processed – disturbingly, this figure is equivalent to May 2008 statistics about the backlog in applications. At the time, authorities said that applications could take up to six years to process, given that Bulgaria had the capacity to process only 10 000 applications a year.

The May 2008 report by the Ministry of Justice said that Bulgaria had received 100 000 citizenship applications since 2001, with a decided upswing after the country joined the European Union in January 2007. The current backlog – as at August 2009 – is said to include applications dating back to 2006.

The issue was revived by Bulgarian media reports alleging that there was a thriving trade in Macedonia and Moldova where companies were acting as intermediaries in getting Bulgarian passports, charging fees ranging from 200 to 3000 euro and managing to get passports for their clients within three months.

The media reports were based on statements made by Bozhidar Dimitrov, the Cabinet minister whose portfolio is Bulgarians abroad, and Plamen Pavlov, former head of the state agency for Bulgarians abroad.

Dimitrov told Bulgarian-language daily Novinar that since 2002, close to 20 000 people in Macedonia and 14 560 in Moldova had got Bulgarian passports, through companies that advertised in newspapers in the two countries.

Pavlov said that corruption in the passport business in Moldova was widespread, and called for Bulgarian prosecutors to investigate all institutions involved in the granting of Bulgarian citizenship.

There have been frequent reports that demand in Macedonia and Moldova for Bulgarian passports is high because nationals of both countries come up with claims of citizenship on the basis of ancestry, and want Bulgarian nationality to access the EU labour market. However, July 2009 media reports in Macedonia said that demand for Bulgarian passports was on the slide because the country was among Western Balkan states that would be admitted to the Schengen "White List" – meaning visa-free access to the Schengen area – as of the beginning of 2010.

The fact that most claims of citizenship are based on purported Bulgarian ancestry is aggravating the congestion.
Bulgaria says that many supporting documents have been found to be fake. Official estimates are that 60 per cent of such documents are fraudulent. This necessitates careful checking of applications and slows the process overall.

Responding to the media reports, Deputy Justice Minister Zhaneta Petrova said that the entire process by which citizenship applications were handled would be reviewed so that new measures could be put in place to eliminate corruption and speed up the process.

In a statement, the ministry said intermediaries should be banned from the process. This would reduce corruption and by requiring applications to be made directly and in person either in Bulgaria or at diplomatic and consular missions, invalid and incomplete documentation could be identified and dealt with right at the start of the process, according to the ministry.