A Minister's Nonsense Threatens the Hemus Highway from Ever Being Built. This was said for the program "Bulgaria, Europe and the World in Focus" on Radio FOCUS with host Tsonya Sabcheva - the Chairman of the Road Safety Institute Bogdan Milchev.
"It is very important that public speaking be based on facts. We at the IPB always adhere to them and, unfortunately, what we have been seeing for several weeks now, what is happening in the government, is extremely worrying. On the one hand, Prime Minister Rumen Radev is extremely incorrect in saying that the Bulgarian government has stopped an order for 1 billion euro worth of crash barriers. We immediately exposed this lie. Long before this scandal, we raised the alarm that the first in-house order of Minister Ivan Shishkov, on his first day of work, was to place 90 million euros worth of crash barriers, and there is no such possibility. These are extremely incorrect things that are happening, and the most striking thing that no one wants to deal with is that since Minister Shishkov has been in this position - he has not uploaded a single task for ongoing repair and maintenance of the roads. This means that either he is not doing road repairs, which is not true, because they are being done and we see it, or he is hiding these tasks, because these are major repairs that are disguised as ongoing ones", commented Milchev.
According to him, this will become another big scandal in Bulgaria.
"We cannot manage money in the dark under the pretext that we are concerned about road safety. There is no way, we are entering a vicious circle from which to get out - we really need very bright spotlights, but at the moment the media is closed. There are few media that give the opportunity and publicity to everything that I say. We from the IPB managed to provoke the first public scandal in the country between the opposition and the ruling party with reproaches against Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev for behaving like a gossip from the Mahlena district. He initially reported that evil tongues were saying that some former prime minister was behind the companies with the crash barriers - only an NGO that has no data can say that. A minister of the interior cannot say that, I can say that if I have no data. After we (editor's note from the IPB) came out with a sharp position on this issue - today he already named the prime minister (editor's note Boyko Borisov / Ivan Demerdzhiev: Behind the crash barrier companies, the figure of Boyko Borisov is visible), but said that "he was transparent" - again with some adjectives - to sue, to deal with, without facts, without evidence!", Bogdan Milchev was categorical.
The expert recalled that he and the Institute for Road Safety were also some of the biggest critics of the government of Rosen Zhelyazkov.