Ok, so I was wrong (1).

Just when I thought that the joke of the Bulgarian State Agency for National Security (SANS) could not possibly get any more ridiculous, it did.

After, what Bulgarian press without any trace of irony refers to as the "Bulgarian FBI", had successfully tracked and cracked down on the publishers of a gossip-blog that threatened the country's national sovereignty by including "elements of classified information" in its articles, it was ready to be assigned a more serious task.

This time, SANS would be set loose on perpetrators of the heinous crime of .... not paying their heating bill.

It took SANS a whole five working days, which allegedly included a seven-hour long interrogation of a journalist, to figure out who were the two owners of the gossip-blog it aimed to shut down in early September this year. I wonder how long it will take them to identify and track down thousands of non-paying subscribers to the Toplofikatsiya services.

The proposal for SANS's new task came from Petko Milevski, head of the local heating company. His idea can only be described as an obvious attempt to out-do the stupidity of the SANS official who, on September 5, claimed that SANS was "ready to participate in a discussion on the removal of anonymity on internet sites on the territory of Bulgaria."

Milevski allegedly claimed the idea was "legally possible".

The loophole that Milevski thought he saw in the Law on the State Agency for National Security (2) was that ensuring the delivery of gas to the heating company was "a matter of national security."

Toplofikatsiya, jointly owned by the Bulgarian state and Sofia municipality, has run up a large debt to state-owned Bulgargaz, with the latter now threatening to stop gas delivery to Toplofikatsiya.

While Milevski could be forgiven for being so focused on his job and the survival of the company he has been trusted to run, to confuse that with national security, it is to be feared that the subtle difference might allude some of the brighter minds that have been elected to run this country.

In an attempt to portray the worst offenders, a Bulgarian television crew for one of the morning TV programmes, visited some of the housing-blocks Toplofikatsiya is currently threatening to stop delivery of central heating and warm water to. The reporter was seen interviewing various grandmothers, dressed in cloths that were in high fashion in the 1940's. Looking over the shoulders of these grannies, TV viewers were given a flashback to what Bulgarian interior design looked like half a century ago.
Heating was expensive, the grandmothers were quoted as saying.

What doesn't help Milevski's argument is the utter lack of efficiency with which the Bulgarian judiciary has handled the court case against his illustrious predecessor for financially draining the company that Milevski is now trying to save from extinction, or the announcement by the Consumer Protection Committee earlier this week that it would start a series of investigations into issues involving unfair metering and charging of customers by Toplofikatsiya. Not to mention the arrest of a Bulgarian "businessman" in Greece at the request of a German court which chose to by-pass Bulgarian Judiciary all-together as a sign of utter distrust.

With less than a year to go before elections, how would calling in the security services to crack down on people who haven't paid their heating bills weigh against sending a few thousand pensioners on an all-expenses-paid sea-side holiday come election time?

1. http://www.sofiaecho.com/article/offline-anonymous-security/id_31711/catid_99
2. http://www.econ.bg/law86416/enactments/article133007.html