BFSA director dissmissed over the “Golden Puddle” case
Four days ago, the director of the Bulgarian Food and Safety Agency (BFSA) was fired for concluding dubious contracts, including the agreement with P.F.C. Ltd, which became known from the “Golden Puddle” case. The contract was about subcontracting preventive disinfection activities on the border with Turkey and collecting due state fees, from which the private company has earned more than BGN 33 million since 2013.
Yesterday the National Revenue Agency announced that during an inspection in the company’s cash registers, BGN 32 million in cash were found, and some of the cash registers of P.F.C. Ltd were old and were not connected to the National Revenue Agency.
ACF has been providing information on the “Golden Puddle” case since 2019 when we filed our first report with the Prosecutor’s Office and published our investigation.
The irregularities in the BFSA contracts cited today by the caretaker Minister of Agriculture are precisely the ones we exposed in 2019:
– The BFSA has violated the law by subcontracting to a private company public activity, which is its legal obligation;
– Violation of the law is collecting state fees from a private company and the formation of profits from it.
Two months ago, in April 2021, the Sofia Appellate Prosecutor’s Office (APO) granted the complaint of the Anti-Corruption Fund against the refusal of the Sofia City Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the Golden Puddle case and returned the case for a new hearing. Then we once again repeated our arguments for violations in the case. In its decision, the APO noted that “there is no way to blindly credit the BFSA’s opinion that there are no crimes without a full verification of the facts presented in it and the report (of the ACF) and due analysis of all applicable regulations.”
“We are glad that after months of lack of institutional reaction to the facts presented in the Golden Puddle case, today we see an intensification in the protection of the public interest. We will continue to monitor the actions of the institutions in this case and the other case of striking irregularities found in the activities of the BFSA – the case of the two favored companies with mobile incinerators, presented in our investigation “War for Corpses,” said the director of the ACF Boyko Stankushev.