SEGA Daily: The findings were described in a letter from OLAF to Deputy Prime Minister Meglena Plugchieva, dated December. 23rd 2008. Sega Daily has a copy of the letter.

The document has not been published so far. New findings from January, 10th, 2009. are the reason for the Ministry of Finance to withhold the money from the budget earmarked for this particular SAPARD measure.

Sources from "SEGA" explained that Ministry of Finance intended to pay another 39 million BGN for this item of the project hoping that when Brussels de-blocks the funds it will be reimbursed.

In its letter OLAF reports the SAPARD irregularities which have been established so far. The office has examined 341 application forms. 88 of them were questioned for being false, copies were made for further investigation.

71 projects have been examined so far and irregularities were found in 90% of them.

There are also doubts for the other 7, but the office still has not been able to prove them. Yet the letter explicitly states that "one cannot eliminate the possibility for the other offers to be suspicious or for other elements of the project not to be inline".

SAPARD regulations require that in case of purchase of machines every manufacturing company should attach 3 tender offers from different producers and buy the equipment with the lowest cost.

OLAF clarifies that they have submitted the information for the false tender offers to Bulgarian judiciary to start their own investigation. The experts warn that they would follow up on the process using "their own procedures".

The letter to the Ministry of Finance, which is at dispose of "SEGA", is addressed to the head of Fund Agriculture Alizan Yahova. It states directly that because of the letter from OLAF from December, 23rd, 2008, no money will be allocated for this measure. The officials form Plamen Oresharski's administration insist that Fund Agriculture provide detailed information about the projects in which OLAF detected irregularities.

"Restoring payments for this measure can not be expected, the projects have irregularities and are from a past period when control was lowered", Deputy Prime Minister MEglena Plugchieva commented yesterday in connection with the letter form OLAF.

The visit of the head of the Antifraud Office Franz-Herman Bruner will not take place but the mechanism for sending OLAF experts to Bulgaria every other week will keep on working.

The companies whose projects are in order, and probably there are some, can sue Fund Agriculture because they have a contract stating that they would receive a subsidy when their project is complete.

the SAPARD measure for the food industry was the first on for which Brussels stopped 60 million BGN last March. The motives were that Bulgaria is procrastinating with the investigation for a possible draining of EU money by a couple of companies connected to businessmen Mario Nikolov and Lyuidmil Stoikov.

According to OLAF and the prosecutor's office the companies have unlawfully gained 7.5 million euros by presenting old machines for new ones. This letter from OLAF reminded of the group and made it clear that the law suit which had been started against it is not over yet while in Germany a person has already been sentenced to 2 years and 9 months of prison.

More than 100 projects for other misappropriations in SAPARD were found from August until November last year by the special Bulgarian working group. The group includes 7 prosecutors, representatives of National Intelligence Service, SANS and State Fund Agriculture.

From the very beginning OLAF has been its advisor and every other week it sends its experts in Bulgaria. The European Office assesses as "excellent" the work of the group on SAPARD and the new management of directorate SAPARD by the State Fund.

Still it was just yesterday that the management of Fund Agriculture accepted the resignation of the head of SAPARD Konstantin Palikarski who stated that he is resigning because the head of the administration withholds all his management decisions on SAPARD.