site.btaFormer Caretaker PM Denies Allegations about Large-Scale Dismissals during His Tenure

Former caretaker Prime Minister Galab Donev Tuesday denied allegations that tens of thousands of employees have been fired under his government. "The allegations circulated by the Council of Ministers [on Monday] that the caretaker governments under my leadership have dismissed over 13,000 employees are false and manipulative," Donev, who is currently chef de cabinet to President Rumen Radev, said in a position put out by the Presdent's Press Secretariat.

More precisely, the government said Monday that a total of 13,211 employees of the ministries and their departments have been laid off during the Donev governments between August 2022 and June 2023, and that the figures were provided by the ministries as a response to media reports about the number of dismissed staff in the administration.

Donev says in his statement that "any objective information about the movement of employees in the administration should indicate the reason for the termination of their contracts". He says further that, first, the figures are wrong, and, second, they include all who chose to leave, moved to a different administration, went into retirement or had been employed under fixed-term contracts and those expired, or were members of a political cabinet and those always leave as the government changes.

The former government leader says that his Cabinet worked "only to take the country through the crises that the previous governments had created and then abandoned". "It is for a reason that as the caretaker government left, it has an approval rating which remains unattainable for the present government," he says before he concludes that "when a lie is circulated by the Prime Minister, it acquires the status of state policy".