site.btaStatistical Institute Dismisses Former TISP MP Karimanski’s "Suspicions about NSI Data Manipulations"

On Monday, the National Statistical Institute (NSI) published an official position against the opinion of Lyubomir Karimanski, former There Is Such a People MP, former chair of Parliamentary Committee on Budget and Finance, and former advisor at the Finance Ministry, who told Nova TV a day earlier that Bulgaria could experience the so-called "Greek scenario" if the country adopts the euro on January 1, 2025, because of possible irregularities in NSI data. Karimanski argued that there is a danger for Bulgaria to become a victim of the so-called "Greek scenario", i.e. to be led to bankruptcy after manipulations in the National Statistical Institute’s data on the actual size of the country's GDP and spending. Karimanski asked for an international audit of the NSI because of suspicions of artificially inflated data aimed at Bulgaria meeting part of the criteria for joining the eurozone.

According to NSI's official position, Karimanski's statement is highly manipulative, defamatory and categorically untrue. The Institute warned Karimanski that he should not make such suggestions. In their words, he should know that audits of the activities of Bulgaria's National Statistical System have been done twice in the past two years. "There were such audits in 2022 by Eurostat and in 2023 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The reports of these audits are public. These were extremely positive and there were no observations on the statistics’ production," NSI's position further reads.

"It should be noted that when commenting on the convergence criteria for membership in the eurozone and on the inflation criterion in particular, comparisons should be made only on the basis of the annual average inflation rate calculated by the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), which is 8.6% in 2023," NSI also said.

Moreover, in the autumn of 2024, Eurostat is to assess the compliance of consumer price indices in Bulgaria, specifically checking the NSI inflation calculation, the Institute added.