site.bta Socialist Leader Ninova Says Georgi Gergov Pushed for Grand Coalition with GERB

Socialist Leader Ninova Says Georgi Gergov Pushed for Grand Coalition with GERB

Sofia, May 3 (BTA) - Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) leader Kornelia Ninova told bTV on Wednesday that she has come under attack for refusing to bring the party into a grand coalition with GERB. According to Ninova, the idea about such a coalition was pushed by a group of people which included businessman Georgi Gergov, until recently a ranking BSP member.

Gergov's name has cropped up in connection with a controversial meeting between the Prosecutor General and a gas tycoon which took place in Gergov's office shortly before last month's parliamentary elections. The controversy has led Gergov to resign from the BSP leadership.

In the televised interview, Ninova said: "Georgi Gergov was of the opinion that we should form a coalition with GERB and I should become speaker of the National Assembly. He told me that if we remained in opposition, we might perish as a political party."

The Socialist leader's remarks were similar to a recent comment by another former major figure in the BSP, Roumen Ovcharov, who said that Gergov was working in collusion with GERB Chairman Boyko Borissov and with controversial businessman and Movement for Rights and Freedoms MP Delyan Peevski. Gergov joined the group because "the BSP needed taming," Ovcharov said.

Ninova said the attacks against her and the BSP are also due to the fact that she has started changes within the party. In the past, "five or six people controlled all the delegates" during the election of a new party chief, but this has changed. Besides that, a new rule whereby a BSP member may not serve as a member of Parliament for more than three terms has met with great resistance in the party, she noted.

On Tuesday, Gergov spoke about the controversial meeting between Prosecutor General Sotir Tsatsarov and gas tycoon and newspaper publisher Sasho Donchev, which was held in Gergov's office in Sofia's TZUM department store and became known as the "TZUM-gate" scandal. Gergov said that he had held such talks with many other people before that. He said Ninova herself has had secret meetings in his office too; she has met with Prosecutor General Tsatsarov, but the meeting was not publicized.

Responding to Gergov's accusations, Ninova said in the bTV interview that she visited Gergov's office at TZUM to meet with National Ombudsman Maya Manolova and bTV show host Slavi Trifonov, who initiated a November 2016 referendum on election rules. "The Ombudsman and I discussed the presidential candidates, while Trifonov and I spoke about his referendum. I met with Sotir Tsatsarov during his official reception hours after I made an appointment with him. We discussed the EU monitoring report and the amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code," Ninova said, noting that she has not visited the Prosecutor General to ask for favours or to talk about corporate matters.

She said she felt insulted by Gergov's words that the BSP Executive Bureau is made up of party members of "the third echelon."