Under fire in a European Commission report that said Bulgaria was failing to do enough against organised crime and corruption, Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev and Interior Minister Roumen Petkov shot back that the report’s statistics were out of date.

The interim report, published on February 4, was based on data provided by Bulgaria as of October 2007. Stanishev said it lacked the latest data on crime fighting in the country. “Some of the data was not included in the report for technical reasons,” Stanishev said at a news conference on January 4.

A similar reaction came from Petkov. “There should be an improvement of the co-ordination between the Interior Ministry and the EC, and I consider this as my personal error,” he told journalists.

However, EC spokesperson Mark Gray said that the new data would not have changed the report’s findings, which were that “Bulgaria’s Penal Code is outdated and cases of alleged high-level corruption and organised crime have continued to be subject to frequent referrals and long delays on procedural grounds”.

The report saw little progress in the joint fight against corruption in Bulgaria. “No concrete results have been reported regarding the improvement of co-operation between the different bodies charged with the fight against corruption.”

The report focused on local authorities as well, saying that duty-free shops on Bulgarian territory at the external borders with Turkey and Serbia and duty-free petrol stations on Bulgarian territory “continue to be tolerated” and had seen a substantial increase in turn-over during 2007. “They are a focal point for local corruption and organised crime.”

As for the data used in the report, Gray said that the EC had updated some of the numbers provided by Bulgaria in the last few days before the release of the report.
The number of prosecutions for organised crime was changed from 14 (October 2007 data) to 21 and the number of sentences in such cases was changed from nine to 24.

Gray told Bulgarian National Television (BNT) that it was “not a question of numbers”.

Stanishev said: “The report has no political power but we can see that Bulgaria has registered a slight progress in the area of fighting organised crime and corruption, although the EC wants to see more convincing results.

“The EC highly values the number of indictments on such crimes and the dozens of sentences.”

Petkov gave the example of Dimitar Zhelyazkov, aka Mityo Ochite (Mityo the Eyes), who confessed in January that he was a drug boss.

“The system works, and the arrest of two National Road Infrastructure Fund employees with 25 000 leva in marked notes proves this,” Petkov said.

The final report on Bulgaria will be published in July, meaning that Bulgaria has less than six months to improve its efforts in fighting organised crime and corruption.