Bulgaria Court Clears Borisov of Garbage Crisis Smear

Politics » DOMESTIC | October 2, 2009, Friday // 12:39
Bulgaria: Bulgaria Court Clears Borisov of Garbage Crisis Smear Bulgaria's capital Sofia has been battling garbage problems for years on end. Photo by Sofia Photo Agency

A supreme court has conclusively ruled illegal the committee set up by the previous Socialist government after it declared a garbage crisis in April this year.

The government is not entitled to establish a crisis committee, a five-member panel of the Supreme Administrative Court said on Friday, adding that the difficulties the capital faced in collecting the garbage can not be described as "a crisis".

The crisis committee splurged more than BGN 1,4 M in hiring five additional companies to collect the garbage parallel to the one, contracted by the municipality.

Finding a solution to Sofia ongoing waste problems was a politically sensitive issue in the months before the parliamentary elections in the summer as the mayor of the capital Boyko Borisov was clearly heading for an election victory.

Borisov, whose party won the general elections in July, suspended in March the contract of the main waste collecting company for failing to clean the city of two million people regularly.

A month later the then Socialist-led government officially declared a state of emergency in Sofia over what they called "a lack of adequate waste removal", saying that the garbage problems threatened national security and citing health and environmental concerns.

The move of the Socialist-led government, hit by a wave of protests over the economic crisis and corruption, was widely seen as pre-election muscle pumping. The dispute, however, led to overflowing dustbins and huge mounds of rotting garbage throughout the capital.

That was the second time that authorities introduced garbage crisis management after residents near Suhodol dumpsite blockaded the landfill in July 2005. The protests left the streets in the capital littered with garbage, posing a serious risk to human health and the environment.

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Tags: Suhodol, garbage, garbage crisis

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