A special 12-member multi-party committee of Bulgaria’s Parliament is to investigate alleged profligate spending and questionable appointments made by Sergei Stanishev’s government in its final year in office.
 
The committee will have a two-month term of office, will be headed by an MP from the ruling party GERB, and have two members from each party in Parliament.
 
As Parliament proceeded to form the committee, the chairperson of Parliament’s committee on the economy, Martin Dimitrov of the right-wing Blue Coalition, said that the Stanishev cabinet had spent something between 500 million and 650 million leva in its final week in office.
 
Dimitrov said: "We must check how this money was spent and on what".

Stanishev’s administration, a tripartite coalition that was in power from 2005 to July 2009, left office after its decisive defeat by Boiko Borissov’s GERB party in Bulgaria’s national parliamentary elections.
 
GERB MP Iskra Fidosova said that what has become known in the media as the "Stanishev Committee" (for its subject rather than its leader) would finalise a list of the deals and appointments to be scrutinised.
 
Bulgarian news agency Focus said that one of the deals would be an order by the Interior Ministry, at the time that it was headed by the BSP’s Roumen Petkov, for four helicopters at a price of 30 million euro.
 
The new Government has cancelled the order, saying that the helicopters were useless for the purpose for which they had been acquired. Petkov, who denies this, has said that he will sue for slander because of this allegation.
 
Media reports said that Defence Ministry ship deals could also be included in the investigation. Also likely to be investigated were diplomatic appointments made by the former government.
 
Dimitrov said that an attempted deal involving the National Revenue Agency building should also be investigated by the committee, as well as deals linked to the Trakiya Highway project.
 
Earlier, the National Audit Office was asked to conduct its own investigation into spending and deals done by the Stanishev government in its last year of office.
 
Fidosova said that if the parliamentary committee found any evidence of crimes, these would be referred to prosecutors.
 
Focus reported BSP spokesperson Kornelia Ninova as saying that the party had no need to worry because of the investigation.
 
"We do not mind the deals being checked," Ninova said. The BSP had supported the referral to the National Audit Office, she said.
 
The National Audit Office investigation will involve 20 auditors scrutinising the Stanishev cabinet’s management of the budget.
 
After taking office, the Borissov Cabinet has moved energetically to reverse several decisions made by its predecessor, including diplomatic appointments and a number of deals said to be unaffordable and against the best interests of Bulgaria.
 
The Regional Development and Public Works Ministry was among the most recent to say that it had found its budget close to running on empty, and has halted about 60 projects pending a review of their worth or otherwise.
 
In the past week, Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Simeon Dyankov has terminated an EU-financed procurement to training in operational programme management, while Defence Minister Nikolai Mladenov and Foreign Minister Roumyana Zheleva also have suspended public procurement procedures ordered by their predecessors.