Bulgarian EU presidency ‘to cost 150M leva’
The Bulgarian presidency of the European Union, scheduled for the first half of 2018, will cost the country about 150 million leva (about 75 million euro), according to Lyubomir Ivanov, head of the national centre for preparation for the presidency.
Bulgaria’s EU presidency was brought forward by six months as a result of the UK’s Brexit vote. After the vote to quit the EU, the UK government said that it would not take up its scheduled rotating presidency of the bloc.
Ivanov said that at this stage, the Bulgarian government had approved 50 million leva. The budgets for 2017 and the first half of 2018 had not yet been approved, but tentatively the whole sum would come to about 150 million leva.
Intensive training of the team to be involved in managing the presidency would begin in September and be completed in mid-2017.
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(Photo: (c) Clive Leviev-Sawyer)
