/ world today news/ Rosen Milenov is the employee of DANS, who publicly confirmed the truth of the records about “Misho Birata”, which the newspaper “Galeria” published in 2011. Milenov also appeared before the internal committee in the National Assembly to testify, because for which he was fired from the agency. He has worked for a long time with special intelligence tools used to investigate corruption at the highest levels of power. Investigations that never went beyond the specialized security services due to political pressure. In this sense, Rosen Milenov has direct observations on the shadow side of power. He has worked in the National Security Service, DG “BOP”, DG “National Police” and DG “Border Police”. He is an expert in economic crime, and now he is a consultant in corporate intelligence and protection against improper market practices.
Corruption in the country is perceived as a given. Politicians are constantly “dealing” with it, the people are talking about it, human rights bodies are analyzing and scrutinizing it, the European Commission expresses doubts in the monitoring report, and throughout the transition it is producing a product – it creates oligarchs, local feudal lords, an underdeveloped economy, a demographic crisis and misery for the people, and behind all this are the politicians – ruling and opposition. That is why in Bulgaria there are “honest” billionaire politicians, others – millionaires, and we like them and elect them – some more often, others less often, and lately they are already self-elected by “voting”.
The patented modern corruption scheme of the ruling elite to grab public funds is in public procurement. Stealing through the expenditure part of the budget, through the procurements in question, is very sweet for politicians, because it is distributed to a limited circle of persons and is successfully camouflaged under the slogan of “visible results” and invisible commissions.
While in the revenue part, through non-payment of taxes, it beats in the eyes and is shared with many participants in the scheme, while at the same time the funds in the state are decreasing every year. So, for example, in cigarette smuggling until last year, around 200,000 people (corrupt politicians and civil servants, oligarchs, smugglers, criminal distributors and smokers) participated in damaging the treasury, and unpaid taxes – excise duty and VAT – about 600 million were distributed between them. BGN per year, to each according to his position on the criminal ladder.
The whole society saw the contraband in the market, the station, the bar and pointed at the rulers. The government, unlike in its first term, took action and brought down the share of contraband cigarettes by over 60%, which I welcome because no other government has achieved this before. As a result of these measures, the 2015 budget received BGN 300 million more from excise duty alone, but unfortunately such measures were not taken in relation to fuels, where the damage is about BGN 1 billion per year. Then we spend this 300 million BGN in excess through the expenditure part of the budget, through a public procurement for a highway lot with a value of 300 million BGN, of which 30 million BGN goes to the politician and 30 million to the contractor oligarch and only they know what they stole.
At the same time, populist trumpets are being made that corruption has been defeated. Yes, an “uncle” from the countryside with an income of BGN 300 loses his income of BGN 30 a month due to the inability to smoke contraband cigarettes, but the bribe is not lost on politicians and oligarchs, because they entered into a new scheme in which it is not shared with anyone .
Annually, the amount that goes through public procurement in the last few years is about BGN 7-8 billion, according to data from the Public Procurement Agency. It comes in two directions – the republican budget, recently patched up by billions of euros in external state loans, with which the rulers buy themselves “stability”, and EU funds, i.e. all taxpayer money. 99% of the orders are predetermined in favor of the entity that paid the commission, the remaining 1% are economically unprofitable.
The standard commission that is established in the country for winning contracts is 10% for the contracting party (ministers, heads of agencies and state companies, mayors, directors of hospitals, schools, etc.), and in certain cases it reaches 20 %. According to data from the chairman of the anti-corruption unit for fighting corruption BORKOR Eleonora Nikolova, 20% of the funds that are allocated through the Public Procurement Act (PPA) do not enter the real economy.
A recent graphic example of such damage, even on a larger scale, is the public contract for the repair of 60 stops of the capital’s public transport with a municipal trading company as the contractor, where nearly BGN 4 thousand was paid for one, and the real price of the repair, according to experts from the construction industry, is under BGN 2 thousand, i.e. 50% of the price is stolen and distributed throughout the chain. The mechanisms for damage are either the acceptance of larger quantities (for example, in road construction, cubes of material from excavations, embankments, etc.), or the input of low-quality materials (for example, insulation materials, paints, etc., in the renovation of buildings). At the same time, the use of such procedures under the PPA, which lacks transparency and eliminates competition, is abused because they are intended to be applied in the presence of extraordinary circumstances. An example of one of the most frequently applied ones is the negotiation procedure without notice.
It is important to know that what should be “flowed” from the order, covering the share of all participants in it, is determined by the contracting authority, and in most cases he sets it at the very beginning of the procedure, that is, in the project. There is a purposeful creation of a corruption scheme by the contracting authority. In the case of orders financed with European funds, the amount for the illegal commissions is also agreed with the managing body of the operational program – an example of such is the infamous rural stadiums for 5-6 million BGN.
The corruption scheme in public procurement has a pyramidal structure. It overlaps with the hierarchical structure of the state apparatus and accordingly corresponds with the separate one in business. At the top is the top political leadership of the country, which actually predetermines the winner in such orders, for which we can conditionally set a threshold value of over 30 million BGN – for lots, tangents, water mirrors, projects in the energy sector, etc. According to Minister Goranov, the companies that earn them are 10 in number, and according to the former Dyankov – 5. They are owned by oligarchs who manage them through appointed persons. An example of such an order is a highway lot.
The top political leadership decides in advance which company will be given the execution of the order, the commission is agreed upon and the decision comes down to the former now state-owned company “Strategic Infrastructure”, used as a buffer to protect the politicians, which according to the law was the contracting authority for this type of orders . The contracting authority sets such requirements once in the tender procedure, a second time in the evaluation methodology and a third time in the technical requirements, to be met only by the company submitted to them from above.
The entire procedure under the PLO was documented, but in essence it is illegal because the principles of publicity, equality, free and fair competition are violated and all this leads to inefficient spending of public funds and damage to the taxpayer. No one imagines that the officials of this company with a state salary, trembling for their seats, like everyone in this country, and their managers, who are politically appointed, when conducting a tender procedure regarding an order for 300 million BGN, will try to oppose political interference and will take away the possibility of a politician to collect 30 million? Such a probability simply does not exist! Of course, and down the hierarchy, the superiors in the departmental institution that administers the procurement procedures find a way to pinch some leva.
This is done by bringing in companies related to them as subcontractors for the supply of materials, with the appointment of their relatives in large construction companies subscribed to public procurement on fat salaries and others. After all, the politician has already set an example of how to do it, and he also allows them, so that they are also dependent – not to allow them to violate the omerta and society learns about the fraud.
We go down the pyramid at local government, where the mechanism for winning public contracts is the same. To the appointed mayor, the government allocates funds from the central budget and the European programs and tells him how much money should be left for the party’s affairs in the region after their implementation in projects – that is, how much he should collect from commissions. Here, the stronger the technocratic team of the mayor and his lobby in the central government, the more money is absorbed and commissions are received, and accordingly, a larger amount will remain for him and his team. At this level, the local feudal lords appear, who win all the construction contracts, collect a large part of the subsidies under the various measures of the European programs and slaughter and hang in the area. This mechanism for winning orders is also applied by the directors of all state and municipal institutions who have pledged themselves to the ruling party, whatever it may be.
You ask yourself, in the presence of all these abuses in public procurement, where are the state bodies – the Commission for the Protection of Competition, the State Financial Inspection Agency, the services and the prosecutor’s office, empowered by law to control this area in view of their powers. They are in place, but the lack of political will to stop these abuses has infected and paralyzed them. They only do PR actions at the behest of politicians, with which they can lower the degree of public tension, which has been raised as a result of the scandalous public procurements that have become public.
In this regard, the populist suspension of large orders by the rulers at the beginning of this year, a consequence of the “melting” in front of the “big bosses” and the public on the part of the coalition partners who felt damaged, will not return the millions of stolen commissions, with part of which they were bought the last local elections, will not fill the people’s sense of lack of justice caused by the impunity of corrupt politicians and officials, will not correct the poor performance of the objects, but will only remain a spectacle for the people.
In every sector – energy, agriculture, defense, health care, education, ecology, etc., criminal cliques have established themselves, which use public funds precisely through public procurement. These cliques are heads of ministries, agencies, regional structures, which carry out staffing along political and shurobajan lines, and therefore the corrupt practices there. The cliques in question are the distributors of political corruption, because they operate precisely under the protection of the highest political body.
All these – corrupt politicians and administrative “cliques”, oligarchs and local feudal lords – have appropriated the state and exploited it in their own interest for 26 years at the expense of the people – through mass privatization, which damaged the treasury by over BGN 20 billion. through non-payment of taxes annually with about BGN 4 billion, through various financial pyramids for billions, fraud with euro funds and now with the mantra “public procurement”. And anyone who wants to do anything in this country has to collude and report to this criminal caste, and that means one thing – falling into the unregulated mafia-type dependencies created by it and working against the nation’s prosperity.
Defacto, this is the content of the status quo, which defends its material interest and, at the cost of everything, opposes any attempt to change towards a fair, rational and expedient development of processes in the state. Or to put it briefly – the old nomenclature has changed into new clothes. And the people…?, Eh, the people…! As long as we all, myself included, follow the maxim “everyone saves and fixes himself”, we will drown one by one, slowly and painfully in the greed and simplicity of these modern Baiganians.
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