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Bulgaria Hits Bottom

Corruption is now strangling its economy and robbing its people of any immediate hope for prosperity and freer lives. As foreigners pull the plug on investments and its stock market falls -- for 20 consecutive trading sessions now, down 82% overall -- Bulgaria continues to be under the world's anti-corruption spotlight.

The European Union, which it joined in January last year, recently suspended aid, fearing that hundreds of millions of Euros were likely to end up in the hands of criminals.

Meanwhile, Bulgarians trying to expose the graft or fight against it are running for their lives. Like the founder of Frog News, Ognian Stefanov, who started the anti-corruption web site a year ago. In September this year, leaving a restaurant in Sofia, four men attacked him and, as the International Herald Tribune reported, methodically shattered his most sensitive bones with pipes and hammers, breaking his elbows and both legs in four places.

?Certain people just decide they can react anyway they choose,? said Mr. Stefanov, who needed eight hours of surgery and remembers that night as a blur of pain. ?The saddest thing is that they can decide anything they want. They are untouchable here.?

The IHT has featured an excellent series of stories on corruption in Bulgaria. It rounded up those reports on Sunday, with the following editorial:

When the European Commission decided in September 2006 to admit Bulgaria and Romania into the European Union, nobody pretended they were really ready.

The thinking was that EU membership would keep them safely out of Russia's orbit. There were also hopes that joining the European political mainstream would accelerate their efforts to rein in organized crime and corruption. The latter was a fairly astounding miscalculation.

What actually happened, as Doreen Carvajal and Stephen Castle have reported in detail in the IHT, was that the prospect of billions in EU subsidies only encouraged the criminals to diversify from smuggling and extortion and to burrow into the political and judicial systems - the better to siphon off EU money.

Today, Bulgaria is rated by Transparency International as the most corrupt nation in the 27-nation EU. The country could lose almost half a billion euros in aid that was frozen in July because of fears that it was vulnerable. Romania is also a cause of serious concern.

This state of affairs is devastating at all levels. The Bulgarian and Romanian people badly need the EU's development aid. And the shocking reports of corruption are hardening the resistance of other Europeans to further expanding the EU, thus lessening the chances of Turkey or Ukraine to ever join.

Perhaps most grievously, the spread of corruption through all levels of government and society, as in Russia and some other Balkan countries, makes it far more difficult to eradicate everywhere.

The IHT articles chronicled how those who tried to expose or combat the criminals in Bulgaria were regularly threatened, maimed or killed, and how these crimes routinely go unsolved. The result, the reporters were told, was that people have come to accept corruption as an unavoidable fact of life and have become apathetic about fighting it.

The wrong conclusion would be to close the EU door forever. The right one would be to ensure that those who pass through it are ready and get all the support they need to be full and healthy members.

As we said in July this year, Bulgaria's leaders need to make a choice: get rid of the sleaze or lose global credibility -- along with public international aid and legitimate foreign private investment. Sadly, the sleaze is still there and growing worse and, as always happens, it's driving out the honest money and well-meaning people.

Readers with recent experience in Bulgaria are welcome to comment.

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Full post as published by The FCPA Blog on November 18, 2008 (boomark / email).

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