Bulgaria's Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev stated Friday in Parliament that the government did not intend to raise the taxes as other European countries had done in order to deal with the effects of the raging global financial crisis.

Stanishev made this announcement during the parliamentary discussion about the government's policies during the period of financial crisis initiated by the rightist opposition party Democrats for Strong Bulgaria of the former PM Ivan Kostov.

"Bulgaria has not been affected by the global financial crisis, and this is the result of our consistent policies", the Prime Minister declared. The Finance Minister Plamen Oresharski in turn said the government had concentrated all of its efforts to preserve the stability of the Bulgarian economy.

"The world is paying the price for the extreme neoliberalism, which dominated in the last 15 years", Stanishev said asking the opposition not to spur panic that the government was not taking the situation seriously enough.

The opposition MPs, however, pointed out that the country was about to enter a period of recession, and that the great losers from the financial crunch were those Bulgarians who were now selling their businesses because they could not finance their loans.

The parliamentary majority of the governing three-way coalition intended to approve a measure obliging the PM and the Director of the Bulgarian National Bank to provide the MPs with information about the economic situation of the country, and the respective policy measures every three months or whenever necessary.

However, the voting on the planned measure failed for lack of a quorum.

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