NATIONAL SECURITY
A standing committee of Parliament will be set up specifically to exercise control of the activities of the State Agency for National Security (SANS), MPs decided on December 11. According to the draft bill, the second reading of which was approved, the leadership of SANS will report to the president, speaker of Parliament and prime minister. When requested to do so by Parliament, the head of SANS should report to the committee.
According to Bulgarian Socialist Party MP Tatyana Doncheva, SANS had all the features of a traditional intelligence service. The head of the committee that will monitor SANS should not come from the opposition, Doncheva said. The ruling majority should have the major share of seats on the committee, she said. The SANS legislation will come into effect on January 1 2008. Within a month from then, the leadership of the agency should be appointed and the agency’s internal regulations adopted. SANS should be operational by March next year.

WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS
A dispute about the ownership of a luxury Audi A8 emerged between the police, the Bulgarian Football Union and a fashion model. On December 11, Bulgarian-language media quoted Blagoevgrad police department head Konstantin Tityanov as saying that his officers had seized an Audi A8 that had been imported into Bulgaria illegally. The import was part of a motor vehicle smuggling ring. The vehicle was owned by fashion model Tsetsi Krassimirova, police said. After being questioned by the police, Krassimirova denied owning an Audi, even though her name was on the registration papers of the vehicle. She said that police had told her that the previous owner of the vehicle was BFU president Borislav Mihailov. Mihailov said that this was not true and his vehicle was a gift from Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, former German football star and current vice president of Bayern Munich football club.

FAKE BANKNOTES
Bulgarian National Bank (BNB) has detected a new type of fake 20 leva bank note. The bank note is marked as 1999 issue, BNB said on December 11. The fake bank note was of low quality with some of the main protective elements imitated: the hologram tape, watermark and metal security strip.

FISCAL ‘CENTRALISATION’
A step backwards from the process of fiscal decentralisation. That is how the opposition described amendments to the law on municipal budgets adopted by the ruling majority on December 11. According to the amendments, municipalities will no longer be able to keep 25 per cent of the taxes that they have collected. Instead everything that they collect will go to the state budget and after that the Government will allocate funds to compensate for the 25 per cent. The reasoning of the ruling majority was that the state budget would compensate municipalities after the introduction of the 10 per cent flat tax rate on January 1 2008 so that poorer municipalities do not have revenue shortfalls.