Famous by its fat salaries and numerous criticisms of the businesses, the Agency for the Promotion of SMEs will continue to manage thousands of euro from the Competitiveness operational programme, even after the government this week officially acknowledged its incompetence and revoked its licence to allocate EU funds for companies. However, the bonuses for the Executive Director of the Agency, Mariana Velkova, will not be sliced, nor to its officials, despite the obvious failures in their work as an intermediate unit of the programme. In practice, the agency is already a hollow structure without key functions, but won projects for over BGN39 million.
According to Deputy Minister of Economy and Energy Julieta Hubenova, after the reforms, the structure led by Mariana Velkova will be responsible only for supporting the export-oriented companies. For this purpose, officials have BGN27.4 million under the project Promoting the internationalization of the Bulgarian enterprises. It was the management of this programme that the agency has already been involved in =a number of scandals and there is no reason to expect that things will improve. This is where the bonuses come from for both the director and employees, Mrs. Velkova thinks.
According to the requirements of Brussels, the funds are to be used to establish a national export portal to develop sectoral export strategies, analyzes and policies, to organize training and information seminars for the development of foreign trade skills to hire experts and consultants as well as to provide the necessary advertising and promotional materials. Of all these tasks, however, none has been executed properly. For example, the organizing the participation of Bulgarian companies in international exhibitions has been a complete failure. To such forums so far a handful of entrepreneurs have been sent to, and then within a very poor organization. To a great extent, behind the embarrassment of the business conference in Qatar, when the Economy Minister Traicho Traikov just left, is again the Agency for Small and Medium Enterprises.
The situation with the construction of the export portal is also not quite clear. The contract for its construction was announced at the end of 2010 and was won with a bid of BGN78,877, VAT excluded, by Lirex BG. The winner had to complete its work no later than 30 April 2011. Only that the real site went online four months later, and the official reason for the delay was … further improvement. It turned out that the contractor delivered the final product on time within all stages of development, but due to weaknesses thee Agency ordered further customization. What exactly this meant is still unclear.
