“The postponement of entry into the Eurozone brings enormous damage to Bulgaria. These are real economic losses,” said Deputy Prime Minister for European Funds Atanas Pekanov in “Why, Mr. Minister”.
According to him, Bulgaria loses BGN 300-400 million a year because it is not in the Eurozone.
“We refuse to have our credit rating raised, or the interest rate on the government debt to fall, which would save how much the budget pays for the government debt. When Croatia entered the eurozone in the summer, they raised their credit rating by one or two steps. This reduced the interest on the government debt by 1% and led to savings. For Bulgaria, this would be savings, in view of the government debts taken, of about BGN 200-250 million per year,” believes Pekanov.
According to the words, due to the postponement of the adoption of the euro, the interest rates for businesses are also not decreasing, which leads to losses of BGN 50-60 million.
“One more thing very important to our fellow citizens abroad. Some of them are part of the “Vazrazhdane” signature against the euro, but they must understand that they work, they toil, they get income in euros, their shops, their businesses get income in euros. They send some part of them to Bulgaria, which are converted. With each conversion of 1 euro, 1-2 cents are lost, it seems small, but these losses amount to 50 million leva”, the deputy prime minister is categorical.
He emphasized that these are losses that we are causing ourselves with our reluctance and inaction to enter the Eurozone faster.
“The postponement of entry into the Eurozone is for obvious reasons. They are that there are rules. Bulgaria currently does not meet two of the five criteria by which it would be assessed for entry into the Eurozone. Due to the inaction of the parliament, we do not meet these criteria”, he added.
He emphasized that for months Bulgaria has not met one criteria – inflation.
“We are working to seek flexibility from our European partners so that a solution can be found that meets the current situation, which is very high inflation in all countries. To seek flexibility in terms of criteria we should have been perfect in all other criteria, instead we have not adopted four laws. Laws that have been required of us for a long time,” said Pekanov.
We are not giving up on the euro and we continue to work. The report requirement date is the end of February. We have known this for a long time, but until then we need to know if we meet the criteria, and we now know that we will not, he added.
“It has been written for five years that we do not meet the criteria. The country would be rejected, and this would have very serious image damage. Don’t imagine we can ask for that every year. Only one country has asked for such a thing – Lithuania. Inflation was rejected only because of one criterion, then it was 3.8%, in our case it is 14%. We do not meet the legislative criteria”, Pekanov specified.
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