State Agency for National Security (SANS) will check state officials from the executive branch of government for potential conflicts of interest, Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev told a March 6 news conference, Focus news agency said.

SANS will check the three declarations state officials will have to submit. Among the officials that will be checked will be cabinet ministers, their deputies and heads of state agencies. In cases where a conflict of interest is found, SANS will notify the official's superior.

The goal of the new regulation was to cut down on corruption, but similar regulations already existed, so the Cabinet was in effect issuing an ordinance that asked for the observance of existing laws, Dnevnik daily said, quoting legal experts.

In January, Vesselin Georgiev was forced to resign as head of National Road Infrastructure Fund (NRIF) for alleged corruption, after a story published by Bulgarian-language Kapital weekly showed that Binder, a firm in which Georgiev's brother was a director, was the beneficiary of NRIF contracts worth tens of millions of leva. Georgiev claimed this was not a conflict of interests.