site.btaMedia Review: November 27

HARSH WEATHER

The heavy rain, intense snow and strong wind that hit most of Bulgaria over the weekend make headline news in national media.

The 24 Chasa daily highlights the fact that the streets of Sofia, Plovdiv and Veliko Tarnovo, among other cities and towns, were strewn with knocked-down trees and broken branches. A frontpage photo shows a snowy scene in Sofia's Lagera neighbourhood in which a car is buried under a fallen walnut tree. In a series of reports under the common headline "First Snow, First Hell", the paper writes that a 57-year-old man apparently froze to death in Kazanlak; wind in Sliven blew at 125 km/h; classes were suspended in 280 schools in 13 administrative regions; three trains were stranded and three regional governors worked to rescue them. "For a day, Bulgaria seemed to go back to the time before its Unification in 1885 as all north-south mountain passes through the Balkan Range were blocked for about 10 hours," 24 Chasa also says. It adds that the storms left 800,000 households without electricity.

Trud puts the number of households affected by power outages at half a million. Water supply to hundreds of settlements was interrupted, the daily adds in its main story, headlined "First Snow Brings Nation to Halt". Sofia was blocked as streets were left uncleared, with fallen trees obstructing traffic. Three hundred power emergency crews were sent to repair outages in the capital.

BNT1, the main channel of Bulgarian National Television, reported in its morning talk show on Monday that over 500 people were stranded in buses for hours near Polikraishte, Veliko Tarnovo Region. They were locked off by huge snow drifts.

ECONOMY & HEALTH

The Bulgarian Socialist Patry (BSP) proposes that the excessive profits of banks should be taxed, Duma says in its main story. It quotes MP Rumen Gechev of BSP for Bulgaria as arguing in a televised interview that this is common European practice, originally applied in the energy sector. According to Gechev, taxing banks' excessive profits will not make loans more expensive. He explained that the proposal is about "unusual, even undeserved, profit which did not result from improving the quality of work or increasing the volume of operations, but rather from short-term advantages". This year, banks in Bulgaria are expected to earn about BGN 3 billion in profits. Since most of them are subsidiaries of large foreign banks, they pay a 10% corporate income tax in Bulgaria and about 25% in the home country, Gechev said, as quoted by Duma.

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Private universal pension funds, where 3.98 million Bulgarians are insured, began to lose money again in August and September, 24 Chasa says. This is evidenced from reports by the 10 funds provided to the Financial Supervision Commission. As at the end of September 2023, universal pension funds had BGN 18.5 billion in assets, increasing by BGN 1.67 billion from the end of 2022. Compared with August 2023, however, they lost BGN 92 million. The losses have affected individual second-pension accounts. In the period from January to September 2023, each person who was paying insurance towards a second pension lost an average of BGN 269 of his contributions.

According to a separate report in the daily, the minimum monthly pension in Romania will become EUR 394 as of September 1, 2024. This compares to an average pension of EUR 403 in Bulgaria in 2023. Romania has outstripped Bulgaria not just in pension size but in all other economic indices, the paper says.

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In the middle of October, Finance Minister Assen Vassilev caused a sensation when he told the Financial Times that the Lukoil Neftochim oil refinery in the Bulgarian Black Sea city of Burgas was up for sale, SegaBG.com recalls in an analysis. Vassilev explained that this followed a series of punitive measures by the Bulgarian government, and the pressure would continue until new owners would emerge. The FT interview triggered an avalanche of comments and political squabble, the website says. Everyone began to discuss who wants - and can - acquire this major enterprise.

The Neftochim owners denied any plans to sell the refinery, but this could just be an attempt to keep low-key on the matter until a deal takes shape, the website notes. Amid all the attacks and the speculation, Vassilev found it necessary to explain: "What I told the FT was that various international organizations showed interest. It is up to Lukoil to decide whether the refinery in Burgas will be sold."

The rumours that the Lukoil Neftochim refinery will be sold are premature, the analysis goes. To begin with, the owner may decide not to sell it. Or it may choose to wait. Such deals sometimes take years to complete. Second, we should remember that Lukoil is not "a Russian state giant". It is a multinational company in which more than 50% of shareholders are private foreign juristic and natural persons whose business interests do not necessarily coincide with those of the Kremlin. And if the Neftochim refinery is up for sale, the last say is certainly not down to anyone in the Bulgarian government.

It is possible that a change of ownership will occur just on paper to shake off the pressure, SegaBG.com goes on to say. This may involve the emergence of a special investment fund or a consortium of offshore companies or recently established firms whose origin is difficult to identify, and eventually it may turn out that the refinery is controlled by Russian capital and Western associates of Kremlin oligarchs.

Lukoil Neftochim is not just a large enterprise. It is of strategic importance. Its future will be decided not only by economic interests but also by geopolitical ones. Therefore, it is hard to make forecasts, the website concludes.

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"AI to Detect Water Leaks in Sofia," runs a headline on MediaPool.bg. The website says that Sofiyska Voda, the operator of the water and sewerage system in the Bulgarian capital, has managed to detect dozens of leaks along its water pipes and to save over 1 million cubic metres of water with the assistance of a Bulgarian startup company and using satellite photos and water infrastructure maps, the website reports. Artificial intelligence is being incorporated into the system to accelerate the processing of data. Majority owner Veolia is expected to provide funding to make it a world project which can be implemented in all of the 58 countries on six continents where the multinational company is active.

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Seasonal influenza is getting active right now; things are developing normally, considering that the season's first flu virus isolations in Bulgaria were made last week, Chief State Health Inspector Angel Kunchev told the morning talk show of bTV. Kunchev said: "We have been monitoring the situation for 30 to 40 years now. In 90% of the time the flu epidemic occurs in late January or the first two weeks of February." He noted that by New Year's Eve there will certainly be no problem for everyone willing, who is over 65, to get a flu vaccine from their personal physician. Older people and those with chronic diseases are most vulnerable to seasonal influenza. Every year, the flu takes between 2,000 and 3,000 lives in these two groups, Kunchev said.

Discussing recently reported cases of "undiagnosed pneumonia" in China, Kunchev said there is already some degree of clarity about it. He noted that increased pneumonia incidence is not surprising at this time of the year, but the problem is that now it is observed in children. Experts have described it as a cocktail of mycoplasma pneumonia, respiratory syncytial virus, adenovirus and some flu viruses, Kunchev said. He added that, for now, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control does not see anything particularly disturbing about it.

POLITICS

A US Navy warship responded to a distress call from the commercial tanker Central Park in the Gulf of Aden that had been seized by armed individuals, and the vessel and its crew, some of whose members are Bulgarian, are now safe, MediaPool.bg reports in its top story, quoting Reuters.

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MP Delyan Peevski's words, "I would not mind being nominated for prime minister even today, I can manage," were discussed by politician and journalist Kalina Krumova and literary activist and publisher Svetlozar Zhelev, who were interviewed on the morning talk show of Nova TV. The US Magnitsky Act sanctioned floor leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms made the remark while criticizing Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov's conduct in connection with the harsh weather that caused much trouble across Bulgaria over the weekend.

Krumova said she was not surprised to hear these words, and described them as a logical continuation of developments in the last few months. She said Peevski obviously has the courage, the backing and the strategy to achieve such a goal. Zhelev commented: "I see nothing logical about Bulgarian politics."

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In an open letter to Education and Science Minister Galin Tsokov, published in Trud, constitutional judge and university professor Atanas Semov says that the words "Motherland" and "Fathrland" are not mentioned even once in any curriculum from 1st to 12th grade in the Bulgarian education system. Nor is there a mention of the phrase "historical memory". Semov asks whether any measures are planned to stop the "de-Bulgarization" of Bulgarian education and to meet the requirements of the law, particularly as regards school subjects like history, Bulgarian language and literature, and geography.