December 9 (SeeNews) - Following are some of the main stories in Bulgarian newspapers on Wednesday morning. SeeNews has not verified these reports and cannot vouch for their accuracy.
DNEVNIK
- Bulgaria will lose 120 million euro in pre-accession funding under the SAPARD programme for aid to farmers which will become unavailable after the end of the year.
- Bulgaria’s ecology ministry is set to prepare an environmental assessment for the Burgas-Alexandroupolis oil pipeline, designed to carry Russian oil to Europe via Bulgaria and Greece. The assessment will be ready in 18 months and will seal the fate of the project, Bulgaria’s premier Boyko Borisov said.
- The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe will decide next year whether to renew, extend or stop the monitoring on Bulgaria, Monitoring Committee Chairman Serhiy Holovaty said. After admitting Bulgaria, the EU set tough conditions for post-entry benchmarking, which analysts have described as "membership under monitoring".
- Russian nationals and vulture funds listed in London and New York are the main buyers of indebted companies in Bulgaria, the daily quoted www.businessforsale.bg as saying.
PARI
- The European Commission will extend funding under its ISPA aid programme to Bulgaria only for the construction of a bridge over the Danube river linking Bulgaria and Romania. In this case over 300 million euro EU funds allocated for Lyulin motorway, designed to link the capital with Bulgaria's western and southwestern regions and a railroad linking the city of Plovdiv with Svilengrad, at the border with Turkey is still uncertain if the projects are not completed on time.
- Bulgarian mutual funds followed closely the fluctuations on the local capital market in November, data of the Bulgarian Association of Asset Management Companies showed. The net asset value of collective investment schemes declined 1.3% month-on-month to 353.61million levs while the blue-chip SOFIX index of the Bulgarian Stock Exchange fell at the same rate to 457.61 points.
(1 euro = 1.95583 levs)