The government should leave office in case that the disclosed data from the meeting of the Council of Ministers is true, Nadezhda Mihaylova, floor leader of the rightist opposition United Democratic Forces declared. “If what has been disclosed is true, it would be humiliating for the opposition to table no confidence vote,” Mihaylova said. The parliamentary group of the United Democratic Forces and the Executive Council of the Union of Democratic Forces had an extraordinary meeting. After the meeting, UDF demanded in a letter the government to present to the party officials the shorthand report. MPs from “Coalition for Bulgaria” also declared that the government has deliberately violated the constitution and thus it should leave office. After a meeting of the Higher Council of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), the party’s leader Sergey Stanishev said that BSP expected explanation on behalf of the prime minister on the case. “It is high time that the prime minister stops acting as a monarch, “ he added. The parliamentary group of the United Democratic Forces proposed to the MPs to ask the prime minister to give an explanation to them on the shorthand report. 101 MPs voted against the proposal, 90 – against and thus the proposal of UDF was overruled.
The government has violated the public procurement act when deciding to sign the contract with Crown Agents, the disclosed in Bulgaria’s Trud daily shorthand report shows. Sevdalin Mavrov, Chief Secretary of the Council of Ministers was the only one who stated that the contract with Crown Agents, which is for consultancy fee of over BGN 30,000 violated the law. To a question of Prime Minister Saxe-Coburg whether there was a chance to shorten the procedure on such a matter of national importance, Deputy Prime Minister Paskalev proposed to link the contract with the concept of national security. Mavrov expressed the stand that the contract had nothing to do with the national security. Finance Minister Velchev did not report at the meeting, according to the disclosed shorthand report, which are the French and American companies, with which preliminary talks on consulting the customs have been conducted. Asked by the prime minister whether the contract could be terminated any time, Velchev answered positively, explaining that three-month warning was necessary. However, he did not tell his colleagues that the contract stipulates that Bulgaria should pay forfeit in case that the contract is terminated less than a year after the signing.
The government on Thursday denied it broke the law by favoring a British company in awarding a contract on reforming Bulgaria's customs and announced an investigation into the allegations. Dimitur Kalchev, State Administration Minister said that many of the published statements in the shorthand report were true but he couldn’t be absolutely sure since a lot of time had passed since then. Meanwhile, Tosho Toshev, editor-in-chief of “Trud” daily said that the shorthand report was authentic and refused to divulge how his paper obtained the information. Upon his arrival from London, where he presented the new eurobonds issue, Finance Minister Velchev commented that the public procurement act hadn’t been violated with the contract with Crown Agents. He pointed out that it was obvious that serious economic interests stood behind the scandal.
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