Bulgaria’s former cabinet headed by Socialist leader Sergei Stanishev wasted 10 million leva on quasi-science in 2006, on a project to cope with earthquakes that drew on an Indonesian thesis translated from an internet website.
 
This was said in a front-page report in Bulgarian-language mass-circulation daily Trud on September 1 2009, the day after Martin Dimitrov, leader of right-wing minority party the Union of Democratic Forces and head of Parliament’s committee on the economy said that official figures showed that Stanishev’s administration blew 621 million leva between July 1 and 10 alone – meaning that it continued huge spending even after it was clear that it had lost the July 5 parliamentary elections.
 
Trud based its allegations on an interview with Tosho Nedyalkov, former deputy chairperson of the governing board of Bulgaria’s State Agency for Information Technology and Communications.
 
Nedyalkov said that the agency got huge amounts of money under various programmes and it would be extremely difficult for an investigation by anyone but experts to find out whether the sums had been used properly.
 
Bulgarian news agency Focus quoted Dimitrov as quoting figures from central Bulgarian National Bank to say that Stanishev’s cabinet had spent about 600 million in 10 days in July.
 
Dimitrov said that he would ask the National Audit Office to inspect the affairs of both the State Agriculture Fund and the office of management of environmental protection activities
 
Roumyana Buchvarova, head of current Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borissov’s office, said that the state had been "totally siphoned off".
 
Buchvarova said that huge sums had been spent even though it had been clear that Bulgaria was in the grip of the economic crisis – and spending had been overstated deliberately. If the development of a programme cost 7000 units, it was accounted for as 70 000 units, for example.
 
The reports follow several weeks of announcements by Borissov’s ministers that, since coming into office in late July, they had found evidence of wasteful spending by their predecessors, draining of ministerial budgets and in some cases, deals that were sufficiently questionable as to be referred to prosecutors.
 
Several ministries have slammed shut projects, in some cases pending reviews as to whether it is worth proceeding with them.
 
Borissov and his ministers have also accepted several resignations of senior officials and, at the Foreign Ministry, reversed diplomatic appointments made in the dying days of the Stanishev cabinet.
 
Interviewed by Bulgarian-language daily Sega, political scientist Antonii Todorov said that instead of daily announcements by Borissov’s ministers about alleged offences by their predecessors, the National Audit Office should do a comprehensive check to produce documentary evidence.
 
Todorov, a political science professor who has served as a political adviser to President Georgi Purvanov, said that it was ill-advised and unfair to portray the Stanishev cabinet as a complete failure characterised solely by abuses by all Stanishev’s ministers.
 
The actions of the Stanishev cabinet, which was made up of ministers from the Bulgarian Socialist Party, Movement for Rights and Freedoms and National Movement for Stability and Progress and was in office from 2005 until 2009, are being scrutinised by state auditors and are to the subject of an investigation by an ad-hoc multi-party committee of Parliament, set up in the week ending August 28 and scheduled to complete its work within two months.