State Fund Agriculture executive director Dimitur Tadarukov has admitted that he was not familiar with the reasons for the European Commission's (EC) decision for the provisional cancellation of the payments European Union's SAPARD rural aid pre-accession programme, mediapool.bg reported on March 9.
Last week, the EC said it wanted payments worth 140 million euro of SAPARD funds frozen, relating to an investigation by the European Anti Fraud Office (OLAF) in 2006, which probed allegations that Bulgarian food producing companies bought second-hand equipment, but registered it as new.
But Tadarukov criticised the European Union's executive body, calling it unprofessional and asking it to take the German and Swiss suppliers of old machinery to court, as quoted by mediapool.bg.
The EC did not give exact reasons for its decision, nor a deadline for when the money would be unfrozen, Tadarukov said, adding that he hoped the decision would be overturned within days, after the meeting of the SAPARD technical committee on March 11.
“If we were the problem, there should have been an auditors’ check already,” he said. EC auditors were scheduled to carry out a check sometime around end-March or early-April, but investigations by the Ministry of Finance and Bulgarian National Audit Office found no ill-doing, Tadarukov said.
State Fund Agriculture was not to blame for the funds being frozen, rather it was a problem with the investigation of the Bulgarian prosecutors, a charge Prosecutor'sOffice has rejected, as quoted by mediapool.bg.
OLAF's investigation involved local firms Elpin Trade, Palmira and Eurofrigo, accused of siphoning off 7.5 million euro of SAPARD funding. Businessman Lyudmil Stoikov, who had helped bankroll President Georgi Purvanov's re-election campaign, owned stakes in all three firms.
Nine businessmen were charged with fraud in the case, although in January prosecutors dropped the fraud charges against Stoikov. The agriculture fund has appealed against charges being dropped, Tadarukov said, accusing the prosecutors of not doing their job properly and delaying the lawsuit.
Just a day earlier, case prosecutor Andrei Andreev said the defendants would be taken to court in the near future, as quoted by mediapool.bg.
