An agreement on the coal sector, signed on Tuesday by the Prime Minister, ministers, MPs and trade unionists, drew strong reactions in the debating chamber of the National Assembly on Wednesday before an expected parliamentary vote on the document.
Speaking from the Assembly rostrum, Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov said: "The discussion was politicized. The discussion was full of untruths and downright lies. Sadly, it was also tinged with blatant rudeness."
The BSP for Bulgaria parliamentary group called for the withdrawal of the agreement. The group's Kristian Vigenin, who is Deputy Chair of the National Assembly, argued that the legislature is not supposed to ratify an informal agreement. That would be contrary to the Constitution, he said.
Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) leader Kornelia Ninova commented to journalists in the corridors of the Assembly: "It is all just chaos, and it is all aimed at 'correctly' distributing the Recovery Plan money to the 'right' firms. It seems to me that these people should be held criminally liable someday. The damage is so big."
According to Ninova, BSP for Bulgaria would not support the parliamentary endorsement of the agreement, because the left wing views it as a "death sentence on the Bulgarian energy industry, nothing but dust in the eyes of the people, just hypocrisy." "You can see that nobody knows who signed the agreement: half of the trade unions disapprove of it, and the Energy Minister, I hear, described it as unachievable," Ninova said.
/MY/
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