site.bta"By Agreement with BOTAS, Bulgaria is Paying Turkiye Reparations without Having Waged War," MP Dobrev Argued

"The Bulgargaz-BOTAS agreement on natural gas supply has either been done in a most amateurish way by totally incompetent people or is the worst corruption scam because we are ordering something that we don't need," GERB-UDF MP Delyan Dobrev said here on Thursday. He joined a parliamentary hearing on the deal with the Turkish company, its impact on Bulgargaz, the need and options for re-negotiating this deal, and Bulgargaz's inability to effect payments under the agreement as concluded.

On January 3, 2023, the Bulgarian state-owed natural gas supplier Bulgargaz and Turkish energy company BOTAS signed an interconnection agreement, under which the Bulgarian side booked capacity of 106.4GWh/day on the Turkish LNG regasification terminals and agreed to pay for this BGN 1 million (EUR 512,000) daily for a period ending in 2035. At present, Bulgargaz does not import gas under the agreement with BOTAS, and in early May its arrears to the Turkish company approximated BGN 300 million. If the 13-year take-or-pay agreement is rescinded, the Bulgarian company will be liable for close to BGN 3 billion in damages. 

By a resolution passed on April 19, 2024, the Bulgarian National Assembly assigned then Energy Minister Vladimir Malinov to take action for re-negotiating the agreement.

"It turns out that, without Bulgaria having waged a war with Turkiye, our energy sector has surrendered and we are paying reparations to Turkiye," Dobrev argued.

"Nobody will ever utilize this agreement because this service come at a quadruple or even quintuple the price charged in Greece for a similar service," the MPs commented. "Bulgaria will be paying reparations for 13 more years. This agreement cannot be terminated by anybody. Bulgargaz has gone bankrupt years ago: the company is completely asset-stripped," Dobrev opined. 

"I hope that members of the State Agency for National Security and the prosecution service are listening in to this hearing," said Ivaylo Mirchev MP of Continue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria. "The agreement was not signed by the Bulgargaz CEO but by caretaker [Energy] Minister Rossen Hristov, because the then Bulgargaz CEO Deniza Slateva was in a hurry to catch her flight," Mirchev said.

"I see this as purely amateurship corruption. How is it possible that this agreement was signed at the Council of Ministers without anybody seeing it?" Mirchev asked. In his opinion, the access of BOTAS to the Bulgarian energy infrastructure is "yet another treason". "We are enabling Russia to pump natural gas into Bulgaria because Russia has turned Turkiye into a methane hub of its own," the CC-DB MP added.