Bulgaria’s Education Minister Sergei Ignatov has promised that everybody involved in corruption in his institution will be identified and punished.

“If there is a mafia inside the Ministry, it will be arrested, and we will start working anew,” said Minister Ignatov after on Saturday the police arrested the chief accountant of the ministry, Krasimir Lefterov, on suspicions that he had leaked in advance the school-ending test taken by 70 000 high school seniors.

Ignatov said on Monday that the man was arrested drunk and did not cooperate with the police. He will be fired as a disciplinary measure.

The Minister has explained that the accountant was most likely not the primary source of the leak, as he did not have access to the school-leaving exam information in his capacity, and that he was probably used by a higher-ranking official in order to transmit the information.

Another possible scenario mentioned by Ignatov is that Lefterov might have copied the questions of the school-leaving test in Bulgarian language and literature while it was being recorded in the Braille alphabet to prepare the exam papers for the visually impaired students.

Yet, the Education Minister admitted he could not be sure and that he expected the investigation report of the police in order to find out if there any more ministry officials involved in the scheme.

The Interior Ministry announced that not more than 60 high school seniors learned the questions of the high-school leaving exam the night before it as a result of the leak.

Education Minister Ignatov said their exams might be annulled on the grounds that they cheated even though no final decision on this issue is available yet.