Brussels, 09/06/2010 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 9 June, the European Commission provided clarification on the reasons behind its sending a Eurostat mission to Bulgaria, as Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn had announced the previous day (see EUROPE 10155). On the sidelines of the Ecofin Council, Rehn spoke of his doubts over the statistical information submitted by Sofia. At the end of May, the Bulgarian government announced that the 2009 deficit was almost double what had been forecast - 3.7% rather than 1.9%. It is still too early at this time to talk of fraud, Rehn's spokesman said on Wednesday.
The Commission's concerns are twofold, he said. “First, the Commission has only belatedly been informed by Bulgarian authorities about sizeable revisions in the budgetary outlook, which constitutes a violation of treaty obligations. And secondly, the Commission lacks information on why Bulgaria has revised its planned 2010 budget”. From being balanced, the 2010 budget is now showing a 2.8% deficit, when the macro-economic scenario would seem to be improving. “Consequently, the Commission is not currently in a position to undertake an assessment of the Bulgarian budgetary plan for this year because of these important changes in a short time.” The main thing, then, is to check the consolidated budgetary data for 2009 in order to have a “solid starting point” and then to assess forecasts for 2010. The Bulgarian authorities have said that the change in the 2009 deficit resulted from the discovery of contracts worth €1.1 billion negotiated by the previous government. But could it be a methodological problem or manipulation of the figures? It is precisely to find out the reasons that the Commission is sending a mission, which will “see if the methods applied to provide the data to the European Commission are carried out in line with our accounting standards”, the spokesman said. At this stage, it would be wrong to speak of fraud: “We have doubts about the methodology applied to the calculation of these data and, therefore, the first thing to do is to check how these data were obtained”. (A.B./transl.rt)