Bulgarian President says will not veto Cabinet’s new debt plan
Bulgarian President Rossen Plevneliev has said he would not veto the bill passed by Parliament on February 25, which ratified the Cabinet’s agreement with four foreign banks to manage the issuance of up to eight billion euro in new debt by the end of 2017.
Speaking to reporters after a business awards ceremony late on February 25, Plevneliev said that he would not heed the calls from the opposition socialists, made earlier in the day. In 2013, Plevneliev vetoed a Budget revision that increased the now-departed Plamen Oresharski administration’s borrowing ceiling by one billion leva (about 500 million euro), so the president had “16 times the reason” to veto new debt plan, socialist MPs said following the bill’s passage on the House floor.
Plevneliev said that the analogy was flawed and the circumstances of the two situations were radically different. “At that point I argued that the ruling majority wanted to artificially increase spending and artificially reduce revenue, opening a huge deficit, and I was proven right,” he said.
Bulgaria’s finance ministry has argued that the new debt was necessary mainly to refinance existing commitments, with about six billion euro worth of bonds due for repayment before the end of 2017. The rest of the money would go to finance Bulgaria’s budget deficits over the 2015/17 period.
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(Bulgarian President Rossen Plevneliev. Photo: president.bg)
