site.btaGreens Party Co-chair Keller Interviewed on Corruption in Bulgaria and EU, Environmental Issues, EU Politics

Sofia, February 9 (Metodi Yordanov of BTA) - The Co-chair of the Greens/European Free Alliance Group in the European Parliament (EP), Ska Keller, was in Sofia Friday to present together with Bulgarian partners a report on the fight against corruption in Bulgaria commissioned by Keller's group. She spoke to BTA on a range of issues within her political interests, including counter-corruption efforts, Bulgarian infrastructure projects which environmentalists oppose and the efforts to form a government coalition in Germany, among other topics.

Following is the full interview:

Q: Welcome to Bulgaria, what brings you to this country?

A: What brings me here is the wish to learn more about the situation, especially with regard to Pirin and Kresna case. Also, I want to tell the protesters who are going out into the street every week to save Pirin, that they are being heard in Brussels and the EU and that they are not alone.

Q: I would like to ask you about the ski lift near Bansko. There has been a lot of talk and heated debates here in Bulgaria surrounding the topic. What would you tell the locals, who see environmentalists as hurting the local economy by trying to stop this project from happening?

A: I think we have to look at ecology and economy together. Especially in a nature park, where the economy is mainly based on tourism and people visit because they love the nature. Preserving the beauty of the national park is really important for keeping up the economy. Skiing, of course, is a very important tourist sector which needs to be developed in a sustainable way, meaning that you could have more people employed because there is a lot of machinery that cannot be used in a national park. At the same time, you do not want to have only seasonal employment, you want to have year-round employment, and that works for tourism if you combine the winter tourists with the summer tourists. Summer tourists would not visit a skiing area where there are no forests, where it looks awful in the summer, so those two things need to be working together.

Indeed, I would go there and talk to the local people and as I want to understand their concerns. For me it is very important to really examine the economy, ecology and social issues together, because we cannot have them working against each other.

Q: You were here for the presentation of a report on combating corruption in Bulgaria. Could you give us a brief summary of the report?

A: The report that we commissioned looks at corruption in Bulgaria, but also in the EU institutions and has recommendations for the Bulgarian government, as well as the European Commission, about what should be changed. The report analyses the Bulgarian new law against corruption and finds important shortcomings. These include deficiencies in such areas as efficiency, the division of tasks, but also very importantly, that whistleblowers are no longer protected. If you want to find out where corruption is happening, it is really important that you have whistleblowers, who come out and say: "This is what's happening and we need to address it". That is a very important issue.

At the same time, the EC needs to do more to attack possibilities for corruption across the EU institutions. The EU is handing out a lot of money, and when there is a lot of money involved, there is always the possibility for corruption. So we need to be extremely careful about how we distribute it, how we control where it's going, and also to make sure that corruption cannot happen at the EU institutions, and they are recurrently doing too little in that regard.