site.btaVazrazhdane MP Dimitrov: State Must Fulfil its Role and Stop Corruption

The State must fulfil its role, and corruption must be stopped, said MP Nikola Dimitrov of Vazrazhdane in Parliament's lobby on Wednesday. He was approached for a comment on the case of two employees of the Executive Agency for Automobile Administration accused of soliciting and receiving bribes from drivers transporting equipment for Robbie Williams' concert in Sofia on September 28.

This is not the only case of corruption Vazrazhdane can point to involving employees of state agencies and state control bodies, Dimitrov said. He noted that it is no secret to Bulgarian society as a whole that these institutions allow themselves to engage in racketeering. However, according to the MP, the solution is not to close the Road Administration, because then "we would also have to close the Ministry of Transport, as they may also have benefited from racketeering as the agency's principal."

"We want these control agencies to be restructured, because perhaps the National Revenue Agency will have to be closed, as well as the Customs Agency. There are too many control bodies that may be allowing themselves to extort money from Bulgarian citizens, and the State and the prosecution service simply have to play their role," Dimitrov argued. In his words, the Government of Rosen Zhelyazkov must go, because it is not dealing with corruption.

Asked whether body cameras for traffic police officers are the solution to the problem, Dimitrov said that they are part of the solution. "However, if there is no monitoring there either, then it will again turn out that the body camera was turned off or that the employee did not know how to turn it on, or that there was some background noise. And again, it will turn out that there is no transparency and corruption will continue," said the MP. He believes that if there are no penalties for the higher authorities, for the ministries themselves and the heads of agencies, only those purposefully appointed lower down the chain, who were simply collecting money, will be burned.