A draft law on public-private partnerships won't lead to real projects as it stands, Bulgaria's Construction Chamber says in a statement on its website. The text, it says, creates "a framework that makes public-private partnerships legally possible but practically unworkable."
The chamber backs the idea of a stand-alone PPP law and says its position has been consistent and based on principle all along. Public debate on the draft began in early September.
Bulgaria scrapped its previous PPP law in 2017, under paragraph 3 of the transitional and closing provisions of the Concessions Act. The chamber says the country has had no general framework since then, and that this is one reason it has fallen behind Greece. Between 2019 and 2023, Bulgaria's PPP projects were worth 880 million euros; Greece's, over the same period, were worth 2.31 billion euros.
The bill's authors point to two problems. First, private investors show little interest, because there's no overall framework that treats PPPs as a stand-alone way to run projects in the public interest. Second, no institution has enough staff to coordinate such projects, offer guidance or handle their preparation, assessment, award and management. The explanatory notes say that by 2025 no new PPP project had actually got off the ground in Bulgaria.
The chamber says the law was written to control public spending, not to make projects workable and financeable. Roughly a third of the text deals with approvals, penalties and restrictions. One line rules out private initiative altogether, compensation for an early-terminated contract stays below the level of the debt, and disputes can't be settled outside court, the chamber says. Contracts would run for up to 35 years, with no way to adjust for inflation.
The draft sets up a third legal regime — something the chamber says is plain from the text itself, not a matter of interpretation. It creates its own process for picking a private partner, plus its own bodies: an inter-ministerial council of 11 ministers to decide which law a project falls under, and a dedicated unit. The statement says there's no clear line on when the Concessions Act applies, when the Public Procurement Act applies, and when the new law would take over.
Whether the law applies hinges on the transfer of operating risk — the very factor that, under Article 5 of EU Directive 2014/23 and Article 31 of the Concessions Act, defines a concession. That means a contract which is in substance a concession would fall outside the concessions regime, even though the old law was scrapped precisely to stop a parallel regime that clashed with the EU directive.
The chamber also notes the draft says nothing about the builder's role: it sets no construction qualification requirements and doesn't define the status of "contracting authority" under the Spatial Development Act. Nor is it clear whether the contract counts as administrative, under the Administrative Procedure Code, or as a private-law contract. The bill, the chamber says, treats partnership as nothing more than a financial deal, not as a construction, operation or production process.
The chamber has also published detailed comments and proposals on the text.