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SofiaEcho: EC dampens Bulgaria's optimism on lifting of EU funds moratorium
Source: SofiaEcho
The European Commission dampened on June 2 optimism in Bulgaria that the European Union's executive branch would shortly lift the moratorium on funding under the Sapard pre-accession aid programme, frozen earlier this year on suspicion of malfeasances.
There were no grounds to believe that the funds would be unfrozen within days, Dnevnik daily quoted Michael Mann, spokesperson for agriculture and rural development commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel, as saying.
Mann's words came as a cold shower after Dimitur Tadarukov, the head of State Fund Agriculture, said at the weekend that the results of the audit into the spending of funds allocated under Sapard were positive.
It would take EU experts weeks to analyse the findings of their recently-finished audit in Bulgaria, Mann said, contradicting Tadarukov, who said that the audit's results were known last week.
The EU fears that the money Bulgaria is set to receive in structural aid and subsidies, estimated as high as 11 billion euro until 2013, would end up in the wrong hands because of the rampant corruption.
Next month, the EC is set to adopt an interim report on Bulgaria's efforts to fight organised crime and corruption. Should the report find that Bulgaria has not made enough progress in that direction, the EC can recommend invoking the safeguard clauses from Bulgaria's accession treaty, which would see verdicts issued by Bulgarian judiciary void in other EU member states.
EC spokesperson Mark Gray refused on June 2 to comment on the nature of the report. "It is premature to speculate on the commission report to be adopted in July; the commission will send experts to Bulgaria to assess the progress made on the key benchmarks on high level corruption and tackling organised crime," he said in a statement.
"We will then begin the process of drafting the reports. The Bulgarian authorities are working hard to make changes following the concerns raised by the commission on specific existing operational programmes. Commissioner [for enlargement Olli] Rehn was making it clear that more needs to be done to guarantee that European and Bulgarian taxpayers money is properly managed and spent. He has also made clear that he was not pre-empting the commission's report," Gray said.
Dnevnik daily, quoting an unnamed EC source, said that the bloc's executive arm had not yet decided whether it would take a more critical stance towards Bulgaria or even mentione the alleged irregularities that led to the moratorium on spending of funds under all pre-accession aid programmes.