At the first press conference for the media, the Minister of Environment and Water Asen Lichev presented the priorities in his work, his political cabinet, and the financial situation at the Ministry.

Deputy Ministers are Mrs Emilia Toncheva, Mrs Reneta Koleva, and Mr Petar Dimitrov. Secretary General of the Ministry of Environment and Water is Ms Klimentina Deneva, Head of the Cabinet of the Minister is Ms Polya Pencheva, and Advisor to the Minister is Ms Vanya Grigorova. The press conference was also attended by the Executive Director of the Executive Environment Agency (EEA) Ms Rositsa Karamfilova.

Minister Asen Lichev:

The approved budget of the Ministry of Environment and Water amounts to 64.5 million BGN. To date, it has a deficit of 10 million BGN. The other financial source, on which I relied a lot, is the EMEPA with a budget of 70 million BGN, but I found out that it has a deficit of 24 million BGN. As a citizen, I also had the feeling that there was corruption. When I came to the Ministry, I decided to check if this was the case on paper.   

I hoped that the director of the Inspectorate in the Ministry of Environment and Water would assess the corruption risk for individual units. This exercise should be done on the basis of methodology by the Committee for anti-corruption and forfeiture of illegally acquired property. You know how long ago the law on the Committee for anti-corruption and forfeiture of illegally acquired property was voted, but so far there is no such methodology for detecting corrupt practices!

However, I checked whether disciplinary proceedings had been constituted. There was none. Were there any signals to the Prosecutor's Office from the Ministry? There were none!

Regarding the poor management of the Ministry, I will provide the following examples of absence of basic political and strategic documents:

The National Waste Management Plan 2021 - 2028 has not been completed and adopted. It has an indicative budget of 1.639 billion BGN.

The National Priority Framework for the period 2021-2027 has not been completed and adopted by the Council of Ministers.

The development and approval of the Operational Program “Environment” for the period 2021 - 2027 has not been completed.

The state has not fulfilled its commitments under two infringement procedures initiated by the EC. One is for non-comliance by the Republic of Bulgaria with legislation on closure and restoration of landfills with non-hazardous waste that do not meet the requirements. The other is that no protected zones for habitats have been declared.

Other strategic planning documents on which the whole country relies so as to have water in the next six years and to be protected against floods (these are the plans for river basin management) - to date six months late.

Flood risk management plans are running 18 months late. The time horizon of these two plans is 7 years. We have already entered the time period in which they must be available.

Tomorrow I was supposed to invite the media because I was to launch the Real-time water management system along the Iskar River. I do not know if this project will be completed. There were great expectations by the public. You remember that last year there were floods in the Northern part of the Sofia region. If this system had come into force, this could have been prevented.

Special access fences were installed at the entrance of the Ministry. It turned out that there was a special caste of ten VIP employees who entered from a special entrance and had special access to the former minister. I stopped this practice because I do not understand on what grounds there is a caste division of civil servants.

As soon as I took office, I wanted to ban the import of waste for incineration. It turned out that I did not have legal grounds to do so. I cannot prohibit complex permits with waste incineration included. This is a matter of changing the interpretation of the regulation, which is a law by the EC, so as to limit this to a minimum. I could not ban it, but now on the website of the Ministry you can see every day what waste enters the territory of Bulgaria.

I demanded the cleaning up of rivers, dams, and areas with illegal landfills. I turned to the EMEPA director to organize and finance this type of activity, but due to the fact that there is a deficit of millions of BGN, this is impossible. There are no funds for the implementation of the main policies of the Ministry until the end of the year. And due to the lack of a functioning National Assembly to update the budget, this reveals itself as a mine.

I intended to fund the marking of bridges that cross roads and those that cross rivers with the river names. This is very important because it is an element of education and building respect for the rivers that are on the territory of Bulgaria, but I failed to do that as well.

While I am caretaker Minister, I will work to amend the Water Act to prohibit the issuance of permits for hydropower plants in inland rivers.

The Recovery and resilience plan of the Republic of Bulgaria needs to be revised.

I understand the plan as funding for activities that bring added value and increase in GDP, and not as funding for slogans. That is why I am trying with my colleagues from the political cabinet to include the construction of a SPA center in Ovcha Kupel, which could be the largest in Europe, and why not in the world.

I also want to plan the construction of kinetic energy installations from the Danube River, together with our neighbors from Romania along our common border. Such a method does not interfere with shipping or fish migration. A similar one already exists in Austria. I also hope that a port will be built near Kapitan Andreevo, where together with Greece and Turkey we will connect the transport river Maritsa to the Aegean Sea. In this way, we will be able to include the cargo that will arrive by water in road communications. Such projects would increase our standard, not the ones contained in the plan so far.

Deputy Minister Emilia Toncheva:

In response to a journalistic question related to land swaps within Natura 2000 and EC infringement procedures against Bulgaria

For the conflicting properties that are to be purchased and included in “Natura 2000,” the inspection showed that the funds to this end from OPE were redirected entirely to activities to solve the problems with the epidemiological situation. At the moment there are no funds for this, the decision was made entirely by the previous government, the funds are directed almost imperatively.

Regarding the initiated infringement procedures by the EC against Bulgaria in the sector of environment, there are a total of 18. Among them, the key one is for fine particulate matter (PM), a second case has been filed to the Court of Justice of the EU. The state is about to be fined. The problem is that municipalities at the local level have to make efforts and fulfill their obligations to reduce the values ​​of PM, but although those are funded under OPE, they implement very few specific measures. The levels of PM have not reached the parameters specified by the EC and we are far from fulfilling this requirement and therefore we are seriously under danger of having a penalty imposed.

This government and we, as experts in the Ministry of Environment and Water, can try to fight for the distribution of the penalty fee to be tolerable. That is, a fee of 3,156 euro per day has now been set for an area that includes several municipalities, even those that are no longer in violation. We can ask for it to be distributed among all municipalities and, accordingly, only where there is a real violation. This will change the financial effect on Bulgaria.

Polya Pencheva

Chief of Cabinet

In response to a journalistic question related to the stage of implementation of Operational Program “Environment”

Operational Program “Environment” (OPE) 2014-2020 has a budget of 3.393 billion BGN. The contracted projects amount to 3.8 billion BGN, the program is agreed at 112%, this is done on recommendation by the EC - there will be projects that will be impossible to implement, so it is good to have some concluded in advance to ensure the state will be able to use this resource.

So far, 1.366 billion BGN have been paid out. This is 40% of the funds under the program. 473 projects have been submitted, 329 have been agreed, the rest are in the process of evaluation, 263 are in implementation, and 66 have been implemented.

Funds in the amount of 3.6 billion BGN are provided for OPE 2021-2027.

Deputy Minister Reneta Koleva

In response to a journalistic question about the state of the EMEPA budget

According to the initial analysis in EMEPA, only in April the Management Board approved projects for 82 million BGN, while the available expenditure ceiling for 2021 is 70 million BGN. The company has concluded contracts for a total of 111 million BGN, of which payments are pending for 62 million BGN. The expenses incurred since the beginning of the year are 24 million BGN and within the approved expenditure ceiling by the end of the year the EMEPA has 41 million BGN, which means that the funds are insufficient for payments under the concluded contracts in the amount of 20 million BGN. And for all commitments under decisions by the Management Board, the required funds are 176 million BGN.  

As the Enterprise does not have the financial resources to secure these contracts, I, in my capacity as Executive Director of the EMEPA, issued an order to suspend the acceptance of new applications, as well as payments until all inspections have been carried out.