Lora Georgieva from the Anti-Corruption Fund: the court acts in favor of Eurolab are doubtful

Lora Georgieva from the ACF team:

“According to the court’s ruling, only a private entity has the authority to carry out loading and unloading activities, and the Bulgarian Food Safety Agency does not have such powers. But this is unacceptable, as only state authorities have this kind of authority.

Suppose only the private company unloads the goods and makes them available for inspection. In that case, there is no way for the official control body BFSA to effectively and qualitatively carry out the inspection as per regulation: without prior notification and based on risk assessment.

The physical checks that the official control bodies would carry out would be limited to checks on the unloaded part, which is determined by a private party, the private party being in a contractual relationship with the importers, who are also operators.”

For the allowing Eurolab to appeal the rulings of the lower instance court:

“If you talk to any lawyer with many years of practice in the Supreme Administrative Court, they will tell you that such proceedings rarely end with a ruling on the merits. I have not personally seen one; it is usually not allowed because the proceedings themselves are very specific. For it to be validly conducted, it is necessary that the actions carried out are based neither on a normative act nor on an administrative act. In this case, BFSA is acting to implement the law.

We doubt there has been compliance with the requirements of random selection by equal electronic distribution. It is a fundamental principle laid down as a guarantee of independent, impartial adjudication of cases, indeed based on the internal conviction of judges and that of those who are randomly assigned, as the law says.”

Listen to the full interview with Lora Georgieva on this link: https://bnr.bg/horizont/post/101690918/evrolab