Bulgaria’s Cabinet decided on July 17 2008 to ask Parliament to ratify a contract to buy two E-71 Wielingen Class frigates and a Flower Class minesweeper from Belgium for the Bulgarian navy. The decision comes soon after Bulgaria and France revived discussions about a deal for Sofia to buy four corvettes from France’s Armaris.

In a statement after its regular weekly meeting, the Cabinet said that after it had taken delivery of the Belgian vessels, it would be able to fulfil the goals it has in the context of Nato collective defence planning.

The Belgian vessels have the required contemporary armament and equipment as well as complete operational compatibility with Nato ships that will enable them to operate within an autonomous period of 12 months on the world’s seas, Bulgaria’s Cabinet said.

The preferential price of the two frigates and the minesweeper is 54 million euro. Besides the main configuration, the price includes additional equipment, spare parts and tools, training simulators and crew training in Belgium.

The sum will be paid in annual installments up to 2015, the Cabinet said. It said that the value of the contract was 10 times less than the cost of new ships of this class.

Wielingen class is a class of four multi-functional frigates built for the Belgian Naval Component in the 1970s, according to the website of the Belgian Navy. The ships are named after sandbanks in the North Sea, not far from the Belgian coast. The lead ship is named after the Wielingen sandbank. Bulgaria has already bought one of the four ships, the Wandelaar, decommissioned by the Belgian Navy in 2004.

On June 30 2008, it emerged that France and Bulgaria were poised to unshelve the Armaris corvettes deal. The deal is likely to be financed with money from the budget surplus, according to a report at the time in Bulgaria’s Dnevnik.

The news that a project, which has been interpreted in the past as insufficiently justified and too costly, came on the eve of a visit to France by Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev.
 
The development about the French deal was in contrast to a statement by Stanishev in January 2008, when he said the purchase of new corvettes and jet fighters was not realistic, adding that with the purchase of three second-hand vessels from Belgium, Bulgaria would easily make it up to 2015.

Defence analysts in Bulgaria said the super-modern French corvettes were not suitable for closed seas like the Black Sea. Bulgaria should rather bet on smaller, more agile and cheaper vessels.

The purchase of corvettes would have made sense if Bulgaria decided to actively participate in Nato operations in the Mediterranean Sea, Bulgaria's former defence minister Nikolai Svinarov was quoted by Dnevnik daily as saying.