„We are not reporting incorrect data to the European institutions about the financial situation of Bulgaria. Rather, the lack of capacity in several essential areas is playing a bad joke on us. There is no storyline. The policy of the last three years is actually giving results at the moment.“
This was stated in the program “This Morning“ on bTV by former Deputy Minister of Finance and member of the Fiscal Council of Bulgaria Lyubomir Datsov.
„The Ministry of Finance is forced to do so-called innovative finance. Many people do not understand that the big problem is that the budget is a huge system. It has time to strengthen first, to take a certain direction at a certain speed. But when you see that you have taken the wrong direction, it is very difficult to stop it. This is the problem of 2024“, Datsov also said.
„If we talk about innovative finance, in the expenditure part these expenses have a negative sign. In fact, for the next year, if we add these expenses that have been made, we get 1 billion and 200 more expenses, respectively a larger deficit. At the end of the period, some 150 million were spent on the ministry, then a ministerial decree was issued that these expenses were reversed. Nearly 3 and a half billion were not spent from capital expenditures. What if we add them to this deficit? Our calculations show that the budget must float in order to be effective. That is – it cannot remain at a 3% deficit permanently“, he explained.
According to him, over the last three years the deficit should have been between 0.8% and 1% excess.
„We have reached the extreme limit. There is no way you can stop something like the budget in one place and then have it continue in a straight line. It will actually go up and it is absolutely normal for there to be a crisis in 2025. The politicians' talk comes from the fact that they currently do not want to pay the price of the crisis. They do not want to admit their guilt and the wrong policy they have been pursuing. There are no innocent people in this situation“, Lyubomir Datsov also said.
„I would in no way call a good budget in which there is a deviation of over 4% of GDP. 2024 has nothing to do with what was planned for implementation. There is nothing good in the 2025 budget,“ he added.