About 50 shops in the biggest shopping centre in the Black Sea city of Varna remained closed when sales clerks announced they were staging a protest against the economic stagnation, Dnevnik daily reported on February 9 2009.

Workers in the mall stated that because the customer flow decreased in recent weeks, many businesses renting out space have already gone down. Protesters wanted guarantees from the mall's management that despite the grim tendency, they would be able to keep their jobs.

Dnevnik daily quoted Antoniya Angelova, the mall's spokesperson, as saying that no official request has been extended for possible negotiation and sorting out of the problematic issues. She said that so far, organisers of the protest have not been available for dialogue.

Angelova said, as quoted by the newspaper that, perhaps, behind "this boycott" stood some of the shop owners who through such non-traditional means sought to amend their renting contracts and reach an agreement for lower rents.

According to Angelova, the mall's management could only be a mediator, but the real issue concerned the sales clerks and their employers, the shops' owners.

Dnevnik daily said that this "unrest" was not a precedent for Mall of Varna. Around Christmas in 2008, some 81 tenants out of 140 united in an association, whose sole purpose was to negotiate lower rents with the centre's management. Rent contracts are normally signed for 10 years.

Again in December 2008, Pfohe Mall in Varna saw the same rent-related wave of discontent. Tenants claimed that bad management has led to significant decrease of customers and also demanded lower rents.

As previously reported by Dnevnik daily, in Sofia there were no such protests and requests for negotiating of the rental contracts.

Some 25 new malls were planned to be built around the country, but according to the Bulgarian Construction Chamber as quoted by the newspaper, most of them would not be completed within the initially announced time frame. Projects worth more than one billion euro have been frozen since the end of 2008, Dnevnik daily reported.