Information newsletter
Issue 2(14), February 2005

Request experiences: There are no criteria for financing the consumer associations in Bulgaria
Alexander Kashumov, AIP

How much effort and time do you have do invest to learn that the state allocates budget funds to consumer associations without fair (objective) criteria? The following curious case, which developed between December 2004 and February 2005 will try to give an answer to this question.

Yurii Ivanov, head of the citizen watch organization Public Barometer wanted to learn the names of all representative consumer associations which received funding from the state budget in 2004. He also inquired about the criteria used in selecting the representative associations.

The access to information request was prepared by the lawyers of AIP and sent by registered mail to the Ministry of Finance on December 20, 2004. On January 06, 2005 the Ministry sent a letter¹ to Yurii Ivanov accompanied with a Decision² for providing partial access to information and Order ZMR-73/ 21.01.2004. The Ministry of Finance had also sent a letter with an identical number to the Ministry of Economics, forwarding the request for an answer about the selection criteria for financing of consumer associations. On January 11, 2005 Yurii Ivanov personally received at the MF the list of representative associations, financed by the budget in 2004. Since that date, the institutions did not give a single indication that they were willing to give a complete answer to the request.

On February 08, 2005 after talking on the phone with the PR and Protocol, the Records Registry, the Foreign Economics and Trade Policy and the Legal departments at the Ministry of Economics AIP found out that:

The file was received in the Minstry and was registered under No. 04-19-7/ 05.01.2005. It was allocated to experts from the Foreign Economics and Trade Policy department. On Jaunuary 10 they reported to the Ministry of Finance with an answer to the second part of the information request. The Ministry of Finance referred the file back to the Ministry of Economics, insisting that the answer should be sent personally to the requestor. In the latter institution, the file had been allocated to Mrs. Stoyanova, a lawyer, whom - probably incidentally - we could not reach. It turned out she was on a business trip and would not return by the end of the week. When we tried to call Mrs. Stoyanova for the second time on February 16, we were told she was in the Defense (Ministry), that she was quite busy as a whole and pretty hard to reach.

In a phone call from February 08, 2005 we received information that an official from the Foreign Economics and Trade Policy department had prepared a written statement on the request . We also learned that representative consumer associations were determined by interpretation of the law by lawyers of the Ministry of Economics (meaning, that no criteria had been set by an administrative act). In practice, however, the Ministry of Economics considered only associations with the goal of consumer protection explicitly mentioned in their statutes.

AIP called Yurii Ivanov on the same day and told him about all the above corerspondence. Unfortunately, the requestor had still not received the official answer of the Ministry.

As we understood from the above talks, officials in both ministries had put quite a lot of effort into discovering and then hiding the fact that there were no criteria for financing consumer associations with budget funds. There is no administrative act which sets standards for choosing representative consumer associations, under the provision of Art. 39, para. 1 from the Consumer Protection and Trade Rules Act.

Reference to the State Budget Acts since 2001 shows that funds allocated to consumer associations have increased from 50,000 Lev to 56,000 Lev. In 2000 they were 13,330 Lev, meaning an increase of over 40,000 Lev, nearly quadrupling the amount.

1. No. Y-APIA-24
2. No. 11/ 31.12.2004