Bulgarian Cabinet won’t raise salaries of top officials – minister
Bulgarian Finance Minister Simeon Dyankov said on January 14 that the draft bill raising the salaries of the country’s top elected officials would not go to Parliament until after the elections scheduled in the summer of 2013.
The issue made the rounds in Bulgarian media at the weekend, but the bill itself is not new, dating back to April 2012, Dyankov told Bulgarian National Television. It was meant to be the third and last piece of legislation rounding up administrative reform, he said.
The other two bills, on civil servants and the size of state administration, have already been passed. This one was meant to increase the salaries of the top elected officials – including the president, prime minister and speaker of parliament – but also those of political appointees in ministries and local administration (such as district governors and their deputies).
Under previous governments, such political appointees were often appointed on the boards of state-owned companies, from where they drew significantly higher salaries than from their full-time jobs. The current Cabinet has now curtailed the practice, Dyankov said.
He said that Prime Minister Boiko Borissov was the one who killed the bill, saying that it should be postponed until the economy was on a better footing.
(Finance Minister Simeon Dyankov. Photo: Finance Ministry)
