site.btaMedia Review: February 5

POLITICS

Amendments to Bulgarian law are being prepared to enable the country to contribute to the investigation of Putin's aggression against Ukraine, Justice Minister Atanas Slavov tells MediaPool.bg in a wide-ranging interview.

Asked what the Justice Ministry has done in the case of Gleb Myshin, who is believed to have arranged for Russians to receive Bulgarian citizenship, Slavov says the ministry alerted the prosecution service to the case in August 2023. The alert indicated that Myshin had presented fake certificates of Bulgarian origin for other people. Pretrial proceedings are pending. The minister adds that there have been hundreds of refusals to grant Bulgarian citizenship not only to Russians. Many cases are about people from North Macedonia and especially Albania.

In the wake of constitutional amendments passed on December 20, 2023, the justice minister is asked for details about the main changes being drafted to the Judicial Power Act. He says the aim is to ensure that the people whom the National Assembly will elect to the Supreme Judicial Council and the Supreme Prosecutorial Council will meet the constitutional standards of independence and political neutrality. The posting of magistrates, which is often used to promote "convenient" people without a competitive procedure, will be streamlined by limiting the posting period to one year without the possibility of extension. After the Judicial Power Act is amended, the prosecution service will be stripped of any powers which go beyond criminal law.

Asked whether he is happy with the work of the European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO) in Bulgaria, Slavov notes that the EPPO is bound by the confines of national criminal law and has to work with the national courts and the national investigative authorities. Therefore, the assessment of the EPPO's performance cannot be separated from a general assessment of Bulgarian justice. There was a deliberate attempt to raise high barriers to the work of the Bulgarian branch of the EPPO, but Slavov hopes that this is already a thing of the past.

The government wants to update the Penal Code in the part concerning war crimes and crimes against peace and humanity, and to include "aggression" as a crime so as to incorporate the standards of the International Criminal Court's Rome Statute into Bulgarian law to the utmost extent. The aim is to enable Bulgaria to open criminal proceedings by exercising universal jurisdiction in connection with the war crimes and the crimes against peace and humanity committed in Ukraine. This would be an act of support for the international efforts to investigate the Russian aggression in Ukraine, Slavov said in the interview for MediaPool.bg.

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Ex-foreign minister Nadezhda Neynsky (formerly Nadezhda Mihaylova) was asked on the morning talk show of bTV to comment on an agreement which Continue the Change, one of the political forces sharing in the government formula, signed with a lobbyist firm in the United States "to present Bulgaria's strengths to the US political elite." Neynsky said: "I do not know why the agreement was signed by a separate party, and not by the government, and how. I am trying to figure out the meaning of this agreement, which will raise the prestige of one party in the coalition. They do not think as a single whole; they are just trying to gain something."

ECONOMY

Socialist Party leader Kornelia Ninova called on Bulgarians to file court complaints against mobile network operators, Duma reports in its main story. The call comes after the operators announced plans to adjust their prices for inflation. "We should resist the robbery of the people and the lobbyist government by using the power of the law. It is on our side," Ninova said. She pointed to an EU directive allowing any mobile service user to stop using the service without having to pay indemnity, which is not the case in Bulgaria. "Mobile service prices rise automatically as inflation goes up, but wages, pensions and compensation payments never rise automatically," Ninova said, as quoted by Duma, adding that the government cannot be trusted to protect consumers from the arbitrariness of monopolists and corporations.

The topic is also covered by other media. Interviewed on the morning talk show of BNT1 (the main channel of Bulgarian National Television), Consumer Protection Commission Chair Stoil Alipiev said the regulator is trying to find a lasting solution to the issue of adjusting mobile service prices for inflation. "I want to analyze all expert opinions which have been circulated by the media over the last year before I compile a well-reasoned report and submit it to the commission. There are legal arguments protecting consumers, and there are legal arguments protecting businesses. It is not an easy decision."

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Bulgarian statisticians monitor the prices of 852 goods and services every month to determine the rate of inflation in the country, 24 Chasa says in its main story. In 2023 the number of goods and services was 853 but one of the items has been dropped and two others replaced. The current list includes a healthy cooking appliance (multicooker) because frequent sales promotion campaigns in 2023 have led people to buy such appliances on a more massive scale than before, the daily says. Such changes are made every year because consumption varies. Eurostat requires updates to be made at least once in five years.

The partial change of the content of the consumer basket does not distort the data, because every item has its relative weight, which depends on its consumption, National Statistical Institute President Atanas Atanasov told the daily. In 2023, for example, compact discs were taken out of the basket, and excursions abroad were added to it. Still, excursions abroad have a very small relative weight when it comes to the general inflation index. Food products, on the other hand, have a very big weight, at 29%. There are 167 food products on the list of 852 monitored items. In the EU food has an effect on 16% of inflation, which is approximately the budget percentage which the average EU citizen spends on food.

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The growth of prices in Bulgaria should be slowed by at least 1 percentage point this year if the country is to meet the inflation requirement for eurozone entry at the beginning of 2025, the 24 Chasa daily says. Even if Bulgaria manages to contain price growth within 4% by the end of this year, the eurozone membership decision for the country will still be based on compromise, the author argues.

She sees "only two" positive scenarios left for Bulgaria's joining the eurozone. The less feasible one is to ignore the reference values for several member states with unusually low inflation. This depends on Brussels' political will and seems quite unlikely. Under the other scenario, Brussels could make a second exception after the one for Croatia due to the force majeure circumstances in Europe and the world mainly on account of the war in Ukraine. A combined scenario seems most feasible: Bulgaria could ask for an extraordinary convergence report by the end of 2024 and a new target date of eurozone accession in July 2025 (instead of January 2025), the author suggests. She says it is more than obvious that the process is unfolding in accordance with the combined scenario. This was evidenced by European Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis' remark that January 1 is the usual date of admitting a new member to the eurozone, but the date has been chosen just for the sake of technical convenience and can easily be moved to the middle of the year. A little later Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov indicated, too, that a further delay is possible, saying that January 1, 2025, is "not a sacred date".

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US Johns Hopkins University professor Steve Hanke tells "Trud" in an interview that John Greenwood, the architect of the 1983 currency board arrangement in Hong Kong, and Jacques de Larosiere, former governor of the Banque de France, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund and ex-president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, proposed to the Bulgarian government to compile, at no charge, an expert report concerning the future euro changeover in Bulgaria. The idea about the report had come from the Vazrazhdane party. The proposal of the three international experts was met with "deafening silence" from the country's authorities, Hanke says. He is known as the architect of the currency board arrangement in Bulgaria, which has been in place since 1997. Hanke describes the eurozone as a trap without an escape button.

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A cyberdoctor component of a mobile telephone application can recognize the symptoms of a stroke and call 112, Trud says in its main story. The app is being tested in several hospitals in Bulgaria, Rossen Kalpachki, Head of the Neurology Clinic of the St Anne Hospital in Sofia, told the daily. Kalpachki expects that the application will be totally accessible by the year's end. Patients will not have to do anything, it will be enough to activate the app on the phone. The app uses a facial recognition system which unlocks the device. In case of a stroke, the person's face changes, and the telephone reacts to the change.