FINES
Bulgaria’s Commission for Protection of Competition imposed on July 28 a 150 000 leva fine on four foreign law firms operating in Bulgaria because of unfair commercial practices, the CPC announced in a statement on its website. CMS Cameron McKenna was fined 50 000 leva, DLA Piper Weiss-Tessbach was fined 40 000 leva and CHSH Cerha Hempel Spiegelfeld Hlawati and CMS Reich-Rohrwig Hainz were given a 30 000 leva fine each. All the companies were penalised on the grounds of breaching Bulgaria’s Law for Protection of Competition.

RE-ELECTION
The Bulgarian Stock Exchange (BSE) has scheduled for September 23 a general meeting of shareholders to sort out the mandate of its current board of directors. The general meeting was called a week after a Dnevnik story revealed irregularities in the board’s mandate entry in the commercial register. It came to light that the board was registered for a new five-year mandate through 2012 without the mandatory prior sanction from shareholders. The bourse management blamed the controversy on the online form provided by the Registry Agency, which, they claimed, lacked clarity.

GSM
Bulgaria’s telecom regulator has made equal allocations of the idle frequencies in the 900 megahertz spectrum to Bulgaria’s three wireless carriers, a source at the Communications Regulation Commission told Dnevnik daily. The frequency bands were awarded despite earlier claims by industry experts that none of the three wireless carriers would be able to prove they needed the additional resource because they had topped out their initial allocation. The carriers Mobiltel, Vivatel and GloBul, are expected to pay between four and five million leva for the new allocations. The price is tied to a number of parameters, like the number of years remaining in an operator’s licence.

COVER
The hundreds of millions of euro frozen by the European Commission under the Phare, Ispa and Sapard programmes for alleged malfeasance will be covered by the budget surplus, local media reported after the two-day meeting of the leading coalition in Bansko. Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev said on July 27 that he would ask each of the agencies involved in absorption of EU funds to carry out careful inspections of projects under the Phare and Sapard programmes to determine which projects should be proritised for further development, mediapool.bg said.