A REAL TURNOFF
Cable television operators from south-western Bulgaria cut their transmission of private national broadcaster bTV on September 1 because bTV asked them to pay a monthly fee to allow them to carry the channel. Residents of the southern towns of Blagoevgrad, Gotse Delchev, Sandanski, Petrich, Kresna and Razlog cannot currently watch bTV on cable. During the renewal of contracts with cable operators, bTV requested 2.32 leva (excluding VAT) from each subscriber per month, the providers said. Cable providers said that their customers could choose from being deprived of watching bTV or paying a higher monthly subscription fee.

TERMINALS SIGNED
Bulgaria’s Finance Ministry and Japan Bank for International Cooperation signed on August 29 the memorandum for a loan of nearly 230 million euro for the construction of container terminals in the Black Sea ports of Varna and Bourgas. The loan is for 25 years and carries an annual interest of 1.4 per cent, with a seven-year grace period, the Finance Ministry said in a statement. The total cost of the project is nearly 340 million euro and the rest of the money would be provided by Bulgaria’s Cabinet. Varna and Bourgas terminals are to be built by 2014.

EUROTARIFF
Bulgaria’s three mobile telecom providers said that they will all align their roaming calls charges to the Eurotariff introduced in 2007 by the European Union in a bid to set a maximum average per-minute charge at wholesale level and limit charges at retail level. Under directive 717/2007 on roaming on public mobile telephone networks within the community, the price ceiling for calls made shall decrease to 0.46 euro and 0.43 euro, and for calls received to 0.22 euro and 0.19 euro, on 30 August 2008 and on 30 August 2009, respectively, Dnevnik daily reported.

RECRUITMENT
The Cabinet approved amendments to the Civil Servants Act, which envision that at least one per cent of employees of administrative offices with more than 26 staff members would have to be people with permanent disabilities. The changes aim to encourage the employment of people with permanent disabilities to the state administration, the State Administration Ministry said in a statement on August 28. Administration offices with less than 25 employees are not obliged to recruit people with disabilities, as according to the ministry, this would be a too high a number.