Bulgarian PM Appoints Ivan Atanasov Acting Director of Road Infrastructure Agency

Dimitar Ivanov filed his resignation last week, less than three months after he was appointed to head NARI, a body set up recently to replace a government agency in charge of road construction and repairs rocked by a corruption scandal earlier this year. Ivanov gave no reasons for his move. 

Two senior officials of the former National Road Infrastructure Fund were arrested on corruption charges in January and the fund’s executive director Vesselin Georgiev resigned over alleged conflict of interests in February.

NARI runs tenders for the completion of Bulgaria's key Trakia motorway, designed to link the country's western border with the Black Sea port city of Burgas.

Concerned over fund mismanagement, the European Commission froze 88.4 million euro ($117.6 million) from its pre-accession PHARE programme for Bulgaria in the spring. The EU executive also froze in July some 500 million euro in pre-accession aid to Bulgaria, including payments under the SAPARD farm programme and the infrastructure facility ISPA, over suspicions of corruption.

Responding to harsh EU criticism of Sofia's failure to fight high-level corruption and graft, Bulgaria's parliament last week adopted a long-awaited conflict of interest act.

($ = 0.7514 euro)