Sofia municipal councillors from the Bulgarian Social Party (BSP) criticised the city’s cleaning and water supply concessions on February 27, demanding that they were scrapped because of their flaws.

The city’s inspectorate signed invoices for winter snow clearing for a total of five million leva, which was suspicious as the city had experienced only one major snowfall, at the start of January, municipal councillor Petur Kouroumbashev told a news conference.

At that time, the refuse collection concessionaire, who also is charged with cleaning streets of snow, did a poor job, which made it unclear what the money was paid for, Kouroumbashev said.

However, in the middle of February Sofia streets were covered by salt, which also was not necessary as there was no snowfall, he claimed.

Kouroumbashev criticised mayor Boiko Borissov and the city hall, saying that their policy regarding cleaning was to do nothing and hope results would come on their own. The only solution was to cancel the concession and call a new public procurement tender to pick another concessionaire.

The same solution should be sought regarding the water concession in the city, going to court if need be. The city hall stood a good chance of winning the case, since it could easily prove the concessionaire, Sofiyska Voda, had not met its contractual obligations, municipal councillor Rossen Malinov said.

Even if it lost, it would have to pay damages estimated at 63-80 million leva, while the city would lose more than a billion if the contract was allowed to run its course, according to Malinov’s calculations.

The demands come just a day after the leader of BSP’s Sofia party organisation, Roumen Ovcharov promised that it would compile a “register of lies” spread by Borissov and make it available on-line. Borissov’s promises that the city hall would cancel the two concession deals were among the biggest lies, BSP Sofia executive secretary Anton Koutev said.

To check Borissov’s hold over the municipal council, where his Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria (abbreviated as GERB in Bulgarian) party has an absolute majority, BSP would set up a “shadow council”, featuring citizens and representatives of non-governmental organisations, Ovcharov said, as quoted by Dnevnik daily.