The former executive director of the Bulgarian Food Safety Agency, Dr. Angel Mavrovski, has revealed the existence of a long-standing corruption scheme that allowed fake butter to be placed on the market in the country. On the air of the program "Good Morning, Europe" on Euronews Bulgaria, he stated that unscrupulous producers have systematically paid agency employees to avoid control and real sanctions for their activities.
According to the former head, there are serious dependencies in the control system and targeted pressure on inspectors. Angel Mavrovski claims that a vicious practice has been established for collecting a kind of "civil liability fee", which provides comfort to violators. The amounts that the institution's employees received for covering up substandard products varied widely. "10, 15, 20 thousand euros and up" per month were the rates that guaranteed the smooth functioning of the operators, Euronews Bulgaria reports.
Regarding the specific scandal with the fake dairy product, Dr. Mavrovski expressed deep doubt in the official positions of the institutions, defining them categorically as "implausible and unrealistic". He rejected the thesis that the problem only affects individual small batches. "There is no way that one of the batches could be like that", the expert argued, referring to the scale of production.
The former director of the Bulgarian Food Safety Authority also stated that there are serious suspicions of intentional manipulation of laboratory results throughout the entire control chain. "They can disappear or become quick responders," he commented on the treatment of samples taken from the market, adding that inspections are often subject to institutional pressure at the highest level.
Quality problems are not limited to dairy products. According to the information presented by the expert, there are also significant risks in the livestock sector. He warned of dangerous shortcomings in the control of diseases such as plague and small ruminant measles. His doubts are related to the implementation of ineffective or completely fictitious disinfection measures on farms. "We are talking about fraud on a colossal scale," Mavrovski summarized the situation, specifying that all these suspicious cases have already been reported and are being investigated by the competent authorities in the country.