The ruling majority in Bulgaria's Parliament appointed three of the six MPs that will form the parliamentary committee that will exercise control over the State Agency for National Security (SANS). All three MPs come from the ruling majority after the right-wing opposition decided to boycott the vote in protest against the ruling majority's concept of the work of the work of the committee.

Originally both opposition and ruling majority MPs agreed on having an equal number of representatives in the new body, three each. However, later on the opposition disagreed with some of the ideas put forward by the three ruling parties, the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), the National Movement for Stability and Progress (NMSP) and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF).

One of the ideas to which the opposition objected was to set limitations on what the body could request to inspect regarding the work of SANS. The ruling majority wanted to limit the body's access to certain investigations conducted by SANS for fear of leaks of classified information.

It meant that if the committee wanted to review investigations categorised as "special investigations", they would be able to do so only with Parliament's approval which, given the substantial majority held by the ruling parties, will diminish the opposition's role in the process. The opposition said that they did not want their role simply to be to legitimise the committee.

On November 13 2008, the ruling majority made a compromise by withdrawing the idea. The ruling parties suggested that special investigations could be checked after the six members agree by consensus to do so.

But the opposition saw the proposed compromise as insufficient, and refused to nominate its representatives to the committee. The ruling parties decided to leave the issue open for the opposition who will be able to fill in the positions when they decide to do so.

The chairperson of the committee is Nadka Baleva from the BSP. The other two members are Mincho Spasov from NMSP, currently head of Parliament's committee on internal order and public security, and Kasim Dal from the MRF. 

SANS was created in January 2008 as the most powerful investigative body in the country and until now the only control exercised on it was by Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev and Spasov's committee. The latter could only ask SANS head Petko Sertov to appear for hearings and to present reports on SANS' work. 

On November 13 the ruling parties also nominated their three representatives to the sub-committee that is to control the National Intelligence Service. Again the opposition boycotted the process and named no representatives. If approved, the sub-committee will be chaired by the MRF's Yanko Yankov. The other two representatives of the ruling parties will be BSP's Atanas Merdjanov and NMSP's Stanimir Ilchev.