site.btaPress - Review

Sofia, February 12 (BTA)

FOREIGN RELATIONS

"Spyware Prowls Bulgaria," goes the main headline in Trud. The daily says that the Sofia City Prosecution Office started a probe on Friday to ascertain whether the Bulgarian secret services use spyware for wiretapping and surveillance. The controversial software program Pegasus, developed by Israel's NSO Group, is in the main focus of the investigation. The program can penetrate people's smartphones like a computer virus and send back data from the camera, the microphone or the contacts.

Pegasus was created to fight terrorism, but last year an international investigation found that it was being used primarily for wiretapping and surveillance of politicians, magistrates and journalists, the daily recalls.

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Interviewed for BBC's "HARDtalk", Prime Minister Kiril Petkov said that if Russia responds with energy restrictions in the event of new Western sanctions, Bulgaria will have to limit its own electricity exports, SegaBG.com reports. Petkov added that he has discussed with the European Commission an action plan to deal with such a situation.

He said: "If this very bad scenario comes true, we will succeed, but we will be forced to limit electricity exports. The European single market will have to make an exception only for this period this time."

"Bulgaria is still a net exporter of electricity and there may be interruptions for a short period. We are currently building the gas connection with Greece very quickly, from where we can have access to other sources of natural gas. This connection is of the highest priority, we expect it to happen in the next 4-5 months. We are actively trying to reduce these risks, but it is important to note that they must be taken jointly by the European Union and NATO," Petkov said.

Bulgaria's position on the tensions between Russia and Ukraine is unequivocal, the Prime Minister said in response to a question about Russian President Vladimir Putin's attempts to find weaknesses among NATO members: "We have a strong voice in NATO and the European Union. Bulgaria is a very predictable member of NATO and I do not think that the word 'weakness' can be associated with us at all."

POLITICS

It takes 181 seconds (three minutes) for Internet search engine Google to show each of 11,400,000 search results for a list of 19 serious crime suspects which Prime Minister Kiril Petkov has submitted to Prosecutor General Ivan Geshev, 24 Chasa says in its main story. The Prime Minister has admitted that many of the alerts against those people are based on material accessed through Google. In 1998, the engine would have had to dig for 228 days to achieve the same result, the daily estimates.

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A feature about Prime Minister Kiril Petkov, his Canadian wife Linda Petkova (formerly: Linda McKenzie) and their three daughters appears in 24 Chasa, reproducing an item originally published in the National Post of Canada. The Canadian headline says, "Bulgaria Has High Expectations of Its Canadian First Couple", and the Bulgarian headline is, "Linda's Cakes Helped Win Votes for Husband Kiril Petkov". According to the story, the couple first met at the University of British Columbia. He is now Prime Minister of Bulgaria - and she now feels foreign in Canada.

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Destruction of evidence, promises to influence lawsuits in exchange for pecuniary benefits, and a protective umbrella for certain political figures - these are the main violations by Prosecutor General Ivan Geshev identified in alerts against him which have been collected at the Justice Ministry over the last few months. The news has been reported by former caretaker justice minister Ivan Demerdjiev in an interview for the video series "(Op-)position," run by SegaBG.com. The video, dated February 10, features prominently on the news website.

Demerdjiev says in the interview that the alerts against Geshev are expected to warrant a request by Justice Minister Nadezhda Yordanova for the Supreme Judicial Council to remove the Prosecutor General from office. According to one of the tip-offs, Geshev has burned documents relevant to the role of businessman and MP Delyan Peevski in the 2014 collapse of Corporate Commercial Bank. Besides that, the Prosecutor General has tried unsuccessfully to disprove statements about his father's involvement in a shady deal.

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Recent trials against news media show a dangerous tendency in the realm of free speech: what is allowed to one media can be forbidden to another, Capital.bg says in an analysis. It recalls a case in 2019, when, at the zenith of the local election campaign, both left and right wing politicians clearly indicated that there are lines which should not be crossed. They were outraged by Pik.bg publishing nude photos of the girlfriend of Borislav Ignatov, who was nominated for Sofia mayor by Democratic Bulgaria.

The then prime minister Boyko Borissov and Sofia Mayor Yordanka Fandakova (the latter still serving today) dissociated themselves from the website's policy, but members of their GERB party continued to give interviews for Pik.bg and to pour hundreds of thousands of leva into advertisements published on that website, Capital.bg says.

Ignatov's girlfriend filed a complaint, which, however, was rejected by the Sofia City Court. The court ruled that it is normal during an election campaign to look for information about the candidates' way of life. "Drawing moral conclusions on the basis of nude photos can be a topic for some Islamic publication in Afghanistan, if you'll forgive me. But in Europe?" lawyer Alexander Kashumov commented back then.

Exactly the opposite happened in another controversial case at the end of last year, which triggered international reactions, the analysis goes. The case concerns a 60,000 leva claim by the former president of the Sofia City Court (SCC), Svetlin Mihailov, against the MediaPool.bg news website, its Editor-in-Chief Stoyana Georgieva and journalist Boris Mitov. The claim was about media reports by Mitov related to Mihailov's bid to head the SCC. In December 2021, the SCC ruled in favour of Mihailov's claim. The court noted that "in all articles the claimant is described as scandalously notorious, a scandalous millionaire, a verifiably scandalous magistrate [...]"

Summing up, the author of the analysis says that the court sees nothing wrong about the publishing of photos revealing the private life of a mayoral candidate's girlfriend to prove that he is immoral. On the other hand, the media have no right to say that a judge is scandalous even if he has been described as such by a former president of the Supreme Administrative Court and a member of the Supreme Judicial Council as well as a constitutional judge.

ECONOMY

Part of the third line of the Sofia underground railway, the Metro, dropped out of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, although the original idea was to fund its construction using money from Brussels aimed to mitigate the effects of the COVID crisis, Trud says. Instead of asking for 360 million leva for the Metro, the country is now applying for just 217.5 million leva to finance the construction of the railway line from the Hadji Dimiter neighbourhood to the Vasil Levski neighbourhood, the Transport Minister's adviser Viktor Chaushev explained during a meeting at which the social partners were updated on the latest draft of the Recovery Plan.

Finance Minister Asen Vasilev said the changes have already been presented to Brussels, although they have not been discussed between the stakeholders, and the European Commission has even come up with an unofficial position, the paper notes.

The National Recovery and Resilience Plan is also discussed in a comment on Capital.bg, which says that the biggest changes the government has made to the Plan are in the energy sector. To put it in a nutshell, a request for one billion leva in funding for gas-and-steam power capacities in the Maritsa East basin has dropped out; there will be no commitment to close coal-fired power plants; the main part of the money is targeted at batteries; and there will be more geothermal power capacities.

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One of 20 stories about "modern optimists" supported by the America for Bulgaria Foundation appears in 24 Chasa. The story is about Teenovator, a programme which helps school students of 10th and 11th grade to discover their passion and turn it into a profitable business project by encouraging their creative thinking and entrepreneurship and assist them in finding business mentors. The programme has been operational for four years and has representatives in 30 Bulgarian towns. This year, it employs 60 mentors who are working with 420 students.

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