A sudden change of directors at Bulgaria's National Statistics Institute (NSI) on January 24 led to speculation about the motives of the move.

On January 24 Stoyan Tsvetkov was released from his function as head of the NSI. He had been hired only nine months prior. His place was take by Mariana Kotseva, who was until then the chief secretary of the NSI.

Motivation for the replacement was that Tsvetkov "did not fulfil his main obligations under the Law on statistics," mediapool.bg quoted a government media statement.

According to Prime Minster Sergei Stanishev, Tsvetkov had been removed because of a series of cases in which the NSI had not delivered important documents regarding statistical development. To make matter worse, there had been a series of cases in which ministers had to find out about important statistical data from journalists or even after journalists did, Stanishev said.

He said it was unacceptable that corrections had to be made for statistics on GDP for the past three years.

Economists from analysis groups and non-governmental organisations however said Tsvetkov had been removed as a reaction to the unpleasant news of the unprecedented high inflation which NSI calculated over 2007.

Programme director for the centre for liberal studies, Georgi Ganev, said it was "not a serious argument" to point to bad work by the NSI and especially its updating of the GDP. As data for the calculation of the GDP changed, that would lead to recalculations which would change the end result, Ganev said.

On January 27 the new head of the NSI, Kotseva, promised that the NSI would "calculate the exact inflation" and that it would regularly provide information to society, mediapool.bg said. Economists found that promise disquieting as it would mean that until now the inflation had not been calculated exactly. There is a method to calculate GDP and that method had been published, there is not reason to believe that method would not have been followed, economists said.