09.04.2024

“The main priorities in the work of the Ministry of Finance remain our accession to the euro area and to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and achieving full-fledged Schengen membership”. This is what Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Lyudmila Petkova said during her joint briefing with former minister Assen Vassilev at her official taking of office. They announced that the regular ECOFIN meeting was to be held on 12 April in Luxembourg. A partnership agreement between the Republic of Bulgaria and the European Commission for the implementation of the euro information campaign, in line with the approved Communication Strategy, would be signed immediately before the meeting.

Regarding the process of euro adoption, Deputy Prime Minister Petkova said that the draft Law on the Euro had been prepared and released for public discussion, then it had to be approved by the Council of Ministers and adopted by the Parliament, with the adoption of the by-laws related to the euro also being due.

Minister Petkova pointed out that another main priority of the Ministry of Finance was the project for the establishment of a single revenue agency merging the NRA and the Customs Agency. A council has been appointed to be in charge of the project and a coordination group and working groups consisting of experts from both agencies and from the Ministry of Finance have been set up to work on this restructuring. “At the moment the main thing is to prepare all the legislative amendments that are necessary for the implementation of the project and then the by-laws, but we are working in parallel. No redundancies are foreseen in either agency. All experts will be used to the maximum capacity, and even though some of the functions will be suspended because of Schengen, they will assume other functions”, Mrs. Lyudmila Petkova is adamant.

“The main priority of the caretaker government is to hold the elections. The estimate for the elections is ready. It amounts to BGN 100 million and we will submit it to the Council of Ministers for approval. There will be some additional expenses on the account of the Central Electoral Commission for the ballot papers, for software and for machine maintenance. This will happen on Wednesday or Thursday, depending on the promulgation of the presidential decree on the elections”, said the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance.  

Responding to a media question, Deputy Prime Minister Petkova assured that the amendments voted in the National Assembly related to the provision of 75 BGN for the Easter allowances of pensioners with the lowest pensions were secured with funds in the budget of the National Social Security Institute and there was no problem for these funds.

The former Finance Minister Assen Vassilev clarified that the revenue agencies had done a very good job – according to the latest data from 5 April, the revenues collected by the NRA were almost 15% more than in the same period f last year, while the revenues collected by the Customs Agency were about 7% less, mainly because of the VAT on oil imports as Lukoil Neftohim was working at half capacity at the beginning of the year. At the moment, there are BGN 9.9 billion in the fiscal reserve, which is completely sufficient for the normal functioning of the state, Mr. Vassilev specified.