Bulgaria sending evaluations of the operational programmes conformity by Christmas

We are almost ready to send the evaluations for conformity of the operational programmes by the end of this year. They have been returned to us twice with remarks from the European Commission mainly with regard to the information system for monitoring and survey of the structural instruments of the European funds. This was said by the dep. minister of regional development Lilyana Pavlova at a presentation of the programme last week.

The delay of the programmes evaluations lead to delays of the interim payments which are about 80% of the operational programmes funding. As a result suffer the beneficiaries and in some regions they already brought suits against the municipal administrations that are not able to pay their dues for the projects.

By SAPARD programme the evaluation is pessimistic where the execution of the programme is 75%. Some of the funding is completely lost, while there are groups of projects of BGN 25m which are subject of verifications by the European service OLAF.