site.btaPresident Radev Urges MPs to Check What Gas Bulgaria Imports

President Rumen Radev called on the National Assembly to examine why the capacity under the BOTAS contract remains unused.

On April 19, Bulgaria's Parliament voted, 166-32 with one abstention, to adopt a resolution assigning the Minister of Energy to take action for re-negotiating an agreement between Bulgarian state-owed natural gas supplier Bulgargaz and Turkish energy company BOTAS signed on January 3, 2023.

Radev told journalists, "I deliberately waited for the BOTAS hysteria to reach its apogee to see the effect of the incompetent and hypocritical attitude towards a complex and important issue for our energy security. I call on MPs, with the same zeal with which they attacked the BOTAS contract, to examine why the capacity under this contract remains unused - for domestic consumption and for sales abroad, that is, to carry out a thorough examination what gas we import from where."

He said many MPs do not want the truth to come out. "When they were in power, they stopped the contract with Gazprom and declared that we would never import Russian gas again, and we introduced appropriate measures. Then came the caretaker government of Donev and there was no gas, only 1 billion cubic meters from Azerbaijan and the only way to supply the rest of the missing amount of about 2 billion cubic meters was through the supply of liquefied gas," Radev added.

"The parties that are supposedly at war with Putin, when they returned to power, instead of finalizing these tenders and importing liquefied gas, went back to their favourite pastime of importing Russian gas en masse through intermediaries. Last year we imported 1.7 billion cubic metres of such gas. That is why the contract with BOTAS and this capacity remains unused," Rumen Radev said.

According to him, the likelihood of non-renewal of the contract for gas transportation from Russia via Ukraine to Europe from the beginning of next year is huge. Then suddenly Austria, Hungary and other countries will be in dire need of new gas sources and routes. Then the contract with BOTAS could be extremely profitable. For Bulgaria to win, both competence and national interests must be placed above partisan and personal interests, Radev added.