Bulgaria can't postpone fight against corruption: Deputy PM

Bulgarian Deputy Prime Minister Meglena Kuneva said here on Tuesday that her country should urgently take effective measures to combat corruption.

"We do not have the luxury of postponing the fight against corruption, and we do not have the luxury to excuse ourselves," Kuneva said while opening a roundtable on the successful European practices for the development of anticorruption policies, organized by the Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD).

Corruption has been sufficiently analyzed in Bulgaria, and there was a clear policy on the European scale, Kuneva said.

Therefore, the question was to what extent Bulgaria could make policy that would work right now, and exactly with those possibilities that the country had in terms of funding and legislation, said Kuneva, who is a national coordinator of anti-corruption policies.

The attempts over the years to achieve a good result were not successful, so the trust in the institutions was not high, she said. "This is a very serious obstacle that must be overcome," Kuneva added.

She reminded that in February her team has presented an analysis, and based on this analysis the government adopted a five-year national anti-corruption strategy and tabled in Parliament a bill to combat corruption.

In a report released recently, CSD said that in 2014 its Corruption Monitoring System has recorded the highest levels of involvement of the Bulgarian population in corruption transactions in the last 15 years. "The very high levels of corruption involvement of the Bulgarian population make criminal law enforcement initiatives ineffective and inadequate," the report said. Endit