Explosion-Stricken Unit of Bulgaria’s VMZ Sopot Military Plant to Start Functioning in a Week

Trade union representatives have vowed that the production process at the explosion-stricken Iganovo site of Bulgarian military plant VMZ Sopot will start in a week’s time.
Dimitar Atanasov, Chair of the Podkrepa Labor Confederation at the plant, explained in a Monday interview for the Bulgarian National Radio that he had received a letter from the Plovdiv District Prosecutor’s Office on Saturday stating that teams of specialists would enter the site and start cleaning it up on May 25.
Atanasov said that the Executive Director of VMZ Sopot had promised that the Iganovo unit would start functioning in around a week.
Workers have been demanding to return to their workplaces at the Iganovo ammunitions depot for weeks, calling for a quick investigation of the blast which hit the site on March 21.
VMZ Sopot employees cancelled Monday a protest and a roadblock scheduled to take place on the same day.
Workers at the Iganovo unit of the military plant expressed concern that unless they went back to work they would not be able to finish orders they had been contracted to carry out, meaning that their salaries would be at risk.
Atanasov was adamant that it was not the looming protests that had made the government speed up work on the site.
An extraordinary meeting of the council for trilateral cooperation in the defense industry is to be held on Monday, after which the Ministry is to publish its official stance on the restart of the production process at the Iganovo site.

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