The Bulgarian Government handed out nearly half a billion leva from its economic stimulus package to municipalities, with Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev saying the key selection criterion was rapid absorption of the money.

The lion’s share, about 155 million leva, was allocated for renovation of kindergartens, schools and streets.

The projects selected for financing do not meet our demands and have been picked using fuzzy criteria, said Ginka Chavdarova, executive director of the national association of municipalities, which recently announced municipalities faced a shortage of one billion leva in their budgets this year.

Five million leva was granted to the Environment Ministry’s ‘For a Clean Environment’ school drawing and singing competitions. The Disaster Management Ministry will get 33.6 million leva to fund reconstruction work after last year’s downpours.

A total of 200 million leva was earmarked for projects that lost their funding from the European Union's Phare and Sapard programmes. The funds have been either irrevocably lost, as is the case with Phare, or have been frozen by the European Commission over suspicions of widespread fraud.

Civil servants handling EU funds aid also got a pat on the back from the Government, which voted bonuses of one to three monthly salaries. Meglena Plougchieva, Deputy Prime Minister in charge of EU funds absorption, declined to name the exact figure, but no one denied reports in Sega newspaper, which claimed that public servants would get upward of 3.2 million leva in bonuses.

Source: Dnevnik