The removal of the head of the National Security Agency is direct, but it is normal to happen, since there is already a new political majority.
This opinion was expressed to the Bulgarian National Radio by Filip Gunev, former Deputy Minister of Interior.
"It is not a very elegant way, it is quite direct - he is removed and put (as chairman) on some commission that most people have not even heard of. But the replacement of senior figures in all services is something traditional, they always change when there is a new political majority, and there is one. Plamen Tonchev was appointed by President Rumen Radev (during the caretaker government of Stefan Yanev - editor's note), the majority are now political opponents of the president. The next chairman of SANS must be a consensus of all parties in the government. Whether he will be Peevski's man, as he has commented, or someone else's - we will see, but he will be of this political majority. A consensus figure will be sought, and if Peevski does not agree, he will rather use various levers to discredit this figure".
In his words, it is important how SANS will be controlled, because in recent years it has been seen that it is uncontrolled:
"During the investigations into the machine vote, it became clear that the head of SANS can do whatever he wants and Prime Minister Denkov called him and asked him to meet with him. Every political party wants to be able to appoint a person in whom it has 100% trust, since there is no real institutional mechanism through which to control him. The only way to control SANS is by having a person in whom you have 100% trust. Until this mechanism is established, the heads of the State Anti-Corruption Agency will change with each new government.
The silence of the leadership of the Customs Agency is strange, Gunev said in connection with the scandals that have arisen in cases related to customs:
"The arrest of the head of the Plovdiv Customs according to a theatrical scenario began with an impressive presence of gendarmerie and people wearing masks who arrested a state official. A certain circle of media immediately circulated that this was a smuggling channel and some connection with the PP was supposedly made out. On the same day, the Prosecutor's Office also came out with a veiled statement. When the court hearing came a day later, it became clear that things looked much different. If it really was a smuggling channel, it could not have been organized and run by one person, and it turned out that there were no other people. Accordingly, he was not charged with an organized criminal group (OCG). However, for two days, the media and the mysterious announcement of the Prosecutor's Office allowed this theater to play out. There is something strange about the whole thing, because the head of the Plovdiv Customs has nothing to do with going to "Kapitan Andreevo" and personally escorting trucks from there to Vidin, as became clear during the hearing.
The circus with the armed gendarmerie and the media attack pursued political goals, Gunev believes:
"An attempt was made to suggest, because he was appointed during the PP-DB period, and the aim was to make it appear that they had something in common. At the same time, it became clear that the political career of this director of the Plovdiv Customs passes through both GERB and PP-DB. These are political appointments. Trust in the Ministry of Interior very often depends on trust in the minister, Philip Gunev pointed out and commented:
"Distrust often grows into a feeling of powerlessness and when impunity is seen, especially for high-level officials, then people want to take matters into their own hands and aggression is the only way out for them when they think that someone will do something to punish the guilty state or other officials.