August 21 (SeeNews) - Following are some of the main stories in Bulgarian newspapers on Friday morning. SeeNews has not verified these reports and cannot vouch for their accuracy.
DNEVNIK
- Bulgarian National Audit Office will audit the work of the previous Socialists-dominated government from the beginning of last year to the end of July, when the new cabinet, headed by right-of-centre GERB party took office, the parliament decided.
- The planned Belene nuclear power plant is not indispensable for Bulgaria's energy balance by 2020, Energy Minister Traycho Traykov said, adding that the project should first be profitable as a public investment. The new government has said it planned to freeze all the big energy projects initiated by the previous one, and to re-evaluate their worth. Galina Tosheva, head of the state-owned energy group BEH, has said that Bulgaria may reduce its stake in Belene to below 51%. The new government said earlier the Belene plant will cost 10 billion euro and not 4.0 million euro as projected by the previous cabinet.
- Bulgaria spent 5.3 million levs in the first half of the year on tourism advertising, data of the State Tourism Agency showed. The agency has an annual budget of 8.5 million levs for advertising.
- State-run railway company BDZ will lay off 2,000 out of its 15,532 employees by the end of the year as an anti-crisis measure, the company said.
PARI
- Some 30% of the fuel market in Bulgaria is in the grey economy, which leads to revenue losses worth some 350 million levs per year for the state budget, the Bulgarian Petroleum and Gas Association said. The association urged the government to speed up measures against smuggling. Prime Minister Boyko Borisov said a day earlier he will order financial audits at the main petrol retailers in Bulgaria: OMV, Eko, Shell and Lukoil. Borisov's government has said it will aim to crack down on petrol and diesel smuggling in a bid to boost budget revenue.
- The state budget looses each year some 3.0 billion levs due to unpaid direct and indirect taxes, as only from the value added tax (VAT) the losses amount to around 2.0 billion levs, Nikolai Ivanov, director of the Financial Intelligence Bureau said.
TRUD
- Ivan Genov, the CEO of Bulgaria’s nuclear power plant Kozloduy, said he will resign on Monday. The statement comes few days after Energy Minister Traycho Traykov said Kozloduy's contracts on energy sale are not as profitable as they could be.
(1 euro = 1.95583 Bulgarian levs)