Quotables

According to the Sofia-based Centre for the Study of Democracy, actual Russian foreign direct investment stock in Bulgaria amounts to €4.5 billion (equivalent to about 11% of GDP). Some analysts caution that endemic corruption, bilateral energy links, and alleged Russian ties to some political parties and interest groups may invite greater overall Russian influence in Bulgarian affairs.

Russia has skillfully leveraged existing and former security services networks that have been alive and well even three decades after the fall of the Communist regime.

The growing Chinese presence in the energy sector could jeopardize EU targets to reduce CO2 emissions.

According to a report last year by the Centre for the Study of Democracy, a Sofia-based think-tank, at least 35 per cent of public procurement contracts involve corrupt practices.

The Centre for the Study of Democracy, a Sofia think-tank, said in a 2019 report that according to local businesspeople, at least 35 per cent of public procurement contracts involved corrupt practices.

A 2019 report by the Centre for the Study of Democracy in Sofia on corruption in Bulgaria said that, according to local business people, at least 35 per cent of public procurement contracts involve corrupt practices.

Borissov has effectively played the “good European,” said Ruslan Stefanov, director of the economic program at the Center for the Study of Democracy, a research group in Sofia. The concern is that oligarchs control critical assets and that leaves the country at the whim of a narrow group of people—what he and his colleagues call a “captured state.”

“If they change their allegiance, it changes the whole orientation of the country,” said Stefanov, who co-authored a study entitled “The Kremlin Playbook in Southeast Europe” published this year.

Ruslan Stefanov, a director at the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia, said Macron had a point, that the EU needed to treat enlargement as a political, foreign policy challenge, not a technical process. “There is a strong political angle to this accession process and this requires a much more assertive foreign policy on the side of the EU.

The report was a joint project of CSIS and the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia, Bulgaria, a European public-policy institute. It is the second in CSIS’s “Kremlin Playbook” series, launched in October 2016 to influence debate over Russian actions in other countries, including its alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
 

"The legal framework for privatization has been made more transparent in recent years but concerns remain about the openness of the process particularly in respect to large-scale privatizations. Coalition 2000 observes ("Anti-corruption Reforms in Bulgaria", Sofia, 2005) that implementation of the Privatization and Post-Privatization Control Act has been “controversial and full of changes and delays. The results of the involvement of the administrative prosecution and the courts in the privatization of the Bulgarian telecom operator and Bulgartabac Holding generated reasonable doubts as to the independence of the judiciary and the existence of strong political corruption pressure on the system."