For the last ten publicly was announced contradictory information on the absorption of EU funds in Bulgaria, to the extent that people began to wonder if country’s politicians have attended Maths lesson at all or they have made up own theories on addition and subtraction of numbers. Firstly, Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Minister Zinaida Zlatanova, who is responsible for the operational programmes, said that Bulgaria is threatened to be among the last in the European Union in terms of absorption of the current EU budget. Then she became more specific and said that at the end of this year the country will probably lose 237 million. Then several publications followed in various media according to which the amount of money Sofia may lose came to a billion lev. The icing on the cake put MEP Ivaylo Kalfin, who officially announced that Bulgaria will likely say goodbye to between half as billion and one billion euro from the funds available for the current financial period. In an attempt to refute these allegations former Minister Tomislav Donchev pointed out that from the confusion in citation of data – I found the following: the government does not intend to work and pay until the rest of the year, and Bulgaria will lose money. But this will cannot be blamed on the previous government.
In this case there is a strange negative gradation delineating future
from bad to worse.
Its purpose should probably be measured by the sociologists. Far more sensible would be to say what measures will be taken to speed up the process of payment of funds from the operational programmes.
In fact in this whole mess of numbers with many zeros never came the answer to the most important question: can the country lose something Sofia has not contracted? The only possibility that the country faces in terms of the overall sum of money set aside is to absorb as much as possible out of them. Only then, when financial monitoring is imposed and violations discovered can we talk about the losses.
We should also remember that in the history of the EU there is no state that has utilized 100% of the envisaged for it EU funds. Therefore results above 90% is considered excellent, and about 80 percent – very good. If Bulgarian rulers were adequate enough they would have clarified these details long ago.
The facts: Deputy Prime Minister Zinaida Zlatanova explained that under the risk of losing is a sum of 30 million from the operational program Environment, between 73 and 123 million under the Regional Development, 50 million – under Competitiveness, 70 million under Human Resources Development, 5 million under Administrative Capacity and nearly 9 million under Technical Assistance. Besides, in question was another 100 million from the programme for rural development. Only operational programme Transport has no risk of any losses. Zlatanova however was clear that this are potential and the indicative figures which can be become smaller and bigger towards the end of the year.
According to Ivaylo Kalfin over the past six and a half years the country managed to use 31% of the structural funds, which means that in order to absorb the remaining 70% the country is required in the next two years to get 150 million euros per month. By the end of the year it will become clear how much money Bulgaria will lose, but the expectations are that they will amount to 6-8% of the funds envisaged for the country during the current financial period, sais he.
In fact, at the time there is no lost money under the seven operational programmes financed by the Structural and Cohesion Funds. This is evident according to all official documents and the information system management and monitoring of EU funds. So far the only funds that have been written off are the 90 million under the programme for rural development, of which nearly 39 million of budget for 2009 and 51 million euro from that of 2010. Losses have been registered in the Fisheries sector – just over 4 million, as well as the trans-border cooperation programmes – a total of 3.3 million.
The BANKER
