Asked to sum up the track record of his Cabinet after 100 days in office, Prime Minister Boiko Borissov looks slightly out of his element, but he is visibly more energised once back in his comfort zone, talking about the "poor inheritance" received from his predecessor.

It is the kind of "inheritance one cannot simply stop talking about", he tells more than 200 people in attendance at the fourth annual meeting of Government and business organised by Kapital weekly and the Confederation of Employers and Industrialists in Bulgaria on November 3.

"You are all businesspeople here and you know what it is like to buy a debt-ridden company. The state, when we took over, was ridden by debts in every single area," Borissov said. "I won’t stop repeating it, because it is the most emblematic case, but we owe 132 million [leva] for last year’s snow-cleaning."

On energy issues, Borissov criticised the previous government’s bad judgment on joint projects with Russia, saying that the Cabinet did not commit to or pull out of them because it had not yet finished analysing costs and benefits.

The planned nuclear power plant at Belene had an uncertain future because it used Russian technology, which faced political opposition within the European Union; the Bourgas-Alexandroupolis pipeline did not assuage environmental concerns and offered little benefit for Bulgarian businesses, he said.

"The Cabinet deserves respect for taking on the task of governing. In the midst of a financial and economic crisis, we could have triggered a political crisis as well, we could have still been without a government," Borissov said.

Borissov accused the opposition of attempting to undermine the confidence in the banking sector by questioning Finance Minister Simeon Dyankov on the fiscal reserve. "I did not expect such arrogance from [the former ruling coalition]. They operated with the fiscal reserve and then ask the question after I said that we would not touch the reserve and deposit it in commercial banks, presuming that because the decision was made behind closed doors, Dyankov will have to keep quiet. The goal is, by raising the question, to undermine the banking system."

Judiciary overhaul
Borissov’s tough stance on fighting corruption won him the elections and continues to give him high public approval ratings. Failure to follow up on this promise with court convictions would equally disappoint voters at home and EU institutions, which continue to monitor Bulgaria’s progress in this area and could cancel billions of euro in accession aid if Sofia fails to prove it cannot prevent the funds from being embezzled.

But asked whether he would take a more active line on judicial reforms, Borissov said that the impetus for change should come from within the judiciary itself. The process was already in motion, he said, referring to the latest row about alleged conflict of interest in the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC), which has resulted in the investigation of at least 12 senior magistrates.

Political interference would only lead to a change of faces, rather than the way the SJC operates, he said, but hinted that the current situation could not go on forever.

"The judiciary is independent in the sense of how it makes decisions, but it is not independent from society. You cannot  have me here standing and answering questions about my first 100 days, whereas the magistrates live there in comfort and no one dares to ask them anything because they are independent," Borissov said.

Silver lining
Despite focusing mostly on the shortcomings of his predecessors, Borissov did not forget to praise the work of his own Cabinet.

He emphasised the Cabinet’s success in balancing the books and recording a 52 million leva Budget surplus in October, saying it would give foreign investors renewed confidence in the financial stability of the country.

On cutting down the share of the grey economy, Borissov’s proposed solutions were a call for businesses to take a more active role in reporting irregularities to the prosecutor’s office and making data available across Government agencies to track down irregularities, as has already been done by linking the databases of the National Revenue Agency and the Customs Agency. In return, he asked employers to keep redundancies to a minimum.