Gunter Verheugen, former Vice-President of the European Commission, has surprisingly announced that Bulgaria and Romania, despite their widespread dirty hands image, are not the two member states most rife with corruption.

“I consider it unjust to accuse these two countries of being corrupt, of not having a functioning administration and of being ruled by the criminal world,” the European commissioner for enterprise and industry told German TV station Phoenix.

“If you asked me which is the most corrupt country in the European Union, Bulgaria and Romania will not be the first countries, which will come to my mind. Nor shall I think of Bulgaria and Romania if you ask me in which country the organized crime has most influence on the government's policy,” Verheugen added.

The top Brussels official however declined to name the country, which he considers to be the most corrupt.

“I will leave it up to every one of you to decide which are the countries that I am thinking of. One of them is very easy to guess, " he said.

The European Commission's interim report in connection with mechanisms for collaboration and control of internal affairs and justice systems in Bulgaria and Romania is expected to be issued in February, though the exact date has not been penciled in yet.

This will be the first European Commission report to assess the measures undertaken by Bulgaria's new center-right government, which swept the elections in July and made an attempt to shake off the country's reputation for rampant graft and crime.

Bulgaria and Romania are still not doing enough to tackle corruption and organized crime, so they will have to accept European Union monitoring for at least another year, the EU's executive said in its latest annual report on the duo, released on July 22 last year.

Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union on January 1, 2007 but owing to shortcomings in justice reform and dealing with corruption the commission has kept an eye on developments through a special monitoring mechanism.

Any failure to redress the problems means that surveillance will continue, a process which resulted in Bulgaria being deprived of hundreds of millions of euros in potential funds.

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