Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev, summoned for Question Time in Parliament on July 18, refused to answer a question whether the freshly amended law on concessions would benefit a project designed by his older brother, architect Georgii Stanishev.
The question was not on the official agenda of the session, but Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria (DSB) leader Ivan Kostov used the opportunity to ask it despite the admonishments of Speaker Georgi Pirinski.
Earlier in the week, the ruling majority in Parliament, which includes the Stanishev-led Bulgarian Socialist Party, passed the amendments to the Concessions Act proposed by the Cabinet. The amendments extend the standard period of a concession contract to 35 years and made it easier for concessions to be extended beyond that period without a tender.
Other provisions in the law would further ease the building of the Black Sea Gardens holiday village, whose designers are Georgi Stanishev and British architect sir Norman Foster, DSB politicians have said, as quoted by Dnevnik daily.
Construction work on Karadere beach, where the one billion euro Black Sea Gardens is to be built, is scheduled to start in 2009. The year-round holiday village has been described as "carbon-neutral" of five settlements with a combined population of up to 15 400, but has come under intense criticism from environmentalists, who say that it would interfere with the areas protected under the European Union's Natura 2000 network and would cause irreparable damage to habitats of wildlife species.
Stanishev is also one of the main advocates of the draft law on conflict of interest, meant to provide clear guidelines on what constitutes conflict of interest and what are the penalties for not declaring it.
The need for the law arose after in January 2008, Kapital weekly reported that the head of the National Road Infrastructure Fund executive director Vesselin Georgiev had awarded contracts for more than 100 million leva to a firm in which his brother sat on the board of directors. Georgiev resigned under pressure, even though subsequent audits at the Fund would not unequivocally go all the way to state that there was a conflict of interest.
