Interior Minister Roumen Petkov, left, and Prosecutor-General Boris Velchev have joined in the demand for more powers for prosecutors.

At a November 16 forum organised by the Union of Bulgarian Jurists, Petkov suggested ways to improve the efficiency of crime-fighting in Bulgaria. By creating two categories - crimes and misdemenours - and reconsidering the scope of cases which the investigative service was competent to investigate, Bulgaria could be more effective in fighting organised crime, Petkov said. The Prosecutor-General should be empowered to assign the investigation of difficult cases to judicial investigators, he said. Under the current system, most offences are investigated by police investigators, leaving judicial investigators - those employed by the National Investigative Service - with a small number of serious cases concerning organised crime, high-level corruption and national security threats, among others. Four days earlier, Velchev asked Parliament to amend the Penal Code to give prosecutors a bigger role in the investigation of crimes. Parliament is currently debating amendments to the code that are expected to put even more pressure on police investigators, according to Petkov. Meanwhile the public debate on the future National Security Agency (NSA) continued. The Cabinet submitted the bill on the agency to Parliament on September 18. The bill is meant to regulate the structuring of the agency by splitting off the current National Security Service (NSS) from the Interior Ministry, Military Counterintelligence from the Defence Ministry and the Financial Intelligence Agency from the Finance Ministry, and integrating them into a single agency. Petkov was among those with doubts about the efficiency of such a mega-agency. In particular, he opposes the transfer of the NSS from his ministry to the new agency. On August 30, Petkov said that he had plans to set up a new criminal investigative directorate in his ministry. The new body was to cover some of the duties of the NSS, namely the fight against organised crime and economic crimes. An important part of the new body's activities will be providing logistics for the NSA. Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov criticised a provision in the bill that the president will appoint the NSA head. On November 20, Borissov told reporters that Bulgaria was a parliamentary, not presidential, republic. He said that President Georgi Purvanov already had people appointed on key state positions, especially in the judiciary. Borissov said that it should not go unnoticed that Velchev and the recently elected Supreme Court of Cassation chairperson Lazar Gruev had been Purvanov's legal advisers.