Bulgaria President Georgi Parvanov has called for tighter controls on Bulgarian army spending “that have probably not been in place during the transition years.”

Parvanov , speaking late Monday in Varna, said that the new center-right GERB government’s program for modernization of the army needs optimization and that GERB should reduce the number of redundancies in the army to a minimum. "It is obvious that at this stage we can not fulfill all those ambitious goals we have set for ourselves," he added.

"It is necessary to assess the status of regulations. There are enough resources and that was our advice to the Minister of Defense," Parvanov continued.

In connection with the incident when 3 children died in an improvised bomb blast at a Krumovgrad orphanage on Saturday, Parvanov said that control over the ammunition must involve not only military but also in social institutions themselves.

Parvanov concluded "I obviously would like the country’s recovery from the financial crisis to be shorter. But my feeling is that 2010 will pass under the shadow of the crisis.”