site.btaContinue the Change Call on Party Defectors to Submit All Information about Pressure to Prosecutor's Office

Continue the Change (CC) calls on the two mayors and the two municipal councillors who left the party to submit all the information they have about pressure to the prosecutor's office and the counter-corruption commission, CC co-chair Kiril Petkov said at a briefing on the sidelines of Parliament on Monday.

Petkov and CC's other co-chair, Assen Vassilev, spoke to the media and addressed the topic of mayors of Sofia's Mladost and Lyulin boroughs, Ivaylo Kukurin and Georgi Todorov, who, earlier on Monday, announced at a press-conference they were leaving CC on the grounds that they had been pressured to conduct rigged public procurement procedures in favour of companies connected to an MP of the party.

As part of the same press conference, Sofia Municipal Councillor and co-chair of CC-DB's group in Sofia Municipal Council, Dimitar Shalafov, and Sofia Municipal Councillor Dragomir Ivanov, also announced that they were leaving the party.

“We still demand the resignation of [head of the Counter-Corruption Commission] Anton Slavchev and [acting Prosecutor General] Borislav Sarafov, so we are absolutely sure that whatever information they [the mayors and municipal councilors] give to these two institutions, no one from Continue the Change would be spared,” Petkov said. He called on the former party members to stop speaking vaguely and hint at irregularities, and instead to actively corroborate and file reports signals to the Counter-Corruption Commission and to the Prosecution Service.

“Continue the Change's executive council calls on all bodies, all members, councillors, to send any information to our supervisory bodies. We will not allow anyone to use the name "Continue the Change" as anything other than a strong anti-corruption promise that will be kept. The two of us, as leaders, Assen Vassilev and I, stand firmly against any such behaviour, our party has a supervisory council that will deal with this,” Petkov added.

Asked if they would be willing to talk to their former party members, Assen Vassilev said that "if they had voiced their suspicions of corruption and had turned first to the party's supervisory council, or to us [Petkov and Vassilev], as leaders of the party, then talks would have been possible. Right now they should be talking to the institutions. Anything else would be interpreted as an attempt to put pressure on them," he added.

"If somebody pressured them to conduct rigged public procurement procedures, not at the lowest price, they should name that person," Vassilev said. "Continue the Change has always fought for all public procurement to be at the lowest price. There is no way to rig public procurement procedures when the lowest price criterion in there," Vassilev added.