The Emilia Maslarova case

 
On November 26, the National Assembly was expected to be asked to vote on whether to endorse a decision the previous day by the parliamentary committee on labour and social policy to oust as its chairperson former minister Emilia Maslarova.
 
Prosecutor-General Velchev earlier asked Parliament to agree to remove Maslarova’s immunity from prosecution as an MP so that she could face criminal charges of corruption. Maslarova denies the charges and volunteered to renounce her immunity without the question being tabled for debate in Parliament.
 
The Maslarova episode in the National Assembly coincided with the somewhat bizarre tale the same day of what may be termed "The Minister and The Ashtray".

According to a November 26 report in Bulgarian-language mass-circulation daily 24 Chassa, a minister who had served in two governments would soon face criminal charges.
 
Allegedly, the minister used a method of burning into notes in a crystal cigar ashtray on his desk the sums he wanted to be paid for services to be rendered. Reportedly, meetings would open with a warning from the minister about eavesdropping devices, so negotiations would be conducted in silence and in writing, if coded messages in a note in an ashtray could be termed as such.
 
The minister is said to have made vigorous and regular use of his office shredder.
 
On November 25, Ataka, the newspaper that is the mouthpiece of Siderov’s eponymous party, alleged that Roumen Ovcharov would become the fourth member of the Stanishev cabinet to be charged by prosecutors, in this case in connection with a deal signed with Russian energy giant Gazprom that had caused, it was claimed, millions of leva damage to the state.
 
On November 20, Nikolai Tsonev, the second of two successive ministers of defence in the Stanishev cabinet, was charged by prosecutors in connection with an equipment purchase deal alleged to have lost the public purse 12.9 million leva, Tsonev denies the charges.
 
Earlier in November, Bulgarian-language mass-circulation daily Trud said that Tsonev’s predecessor, Vesselin Bliznakov, would also face criminal charges.
 
NGO the Centre for the Study of Democracy came out with an estimate in November that under the previous government, about 1.5 billion leva a year went into the pockets of various officials and politicians to get public procurement contracts, a sum that according to the centre, was the equivalent of two per cent of Bulgaria’s GDP.