Regional development minister Ivan Shishkov said contracts for road guardrails in three areas of southern Bulgaria have gone over the legal spending limit. He spoke to reporters in the parliament lobby.
The excess is 50%, and it comes from annexes added to the contracts.
The minister said this breaks the law. The guardrails are being checked, and it has not yet been established whether their certificates are fake. "We will find out," Shishkov said.
He said the guardrails were ordered under the government of Kiril Petkov. The Road Infrastructure Agency (RIA) signed the contracts under the caretaker cabinet, which the minister called "ours". The annexes came after the contracts, and the guardrails were installed in 2024 and 2025.
Shishkov said the caretaker cabinet drew up the first method for adjusting contract prices to inflation. He explained that after the rise in prices, builders could not keep working on the contracts they had signed.
He said the money most likely went to the people who are now making noise about the issue. He added that it is now beyond dispute that laws were broken to benefit someone. In his words, minister Demerdzhiev named those to blame, and that is how the whole guardrail story began.
Shishkov believes everyone linked to the case is trying to shift the blame onto the ministry.
Delyan Peevski, leader of the DPS party, accused Shishkov and the RIA of preparing to steal billions through them. "I don't know what billions are being prepared, we are not preparing to steal anything," the minister replied. He added that the ministry's work will bring investment and better infrastructure, not theft.
The minister also answered GERB's claims that Russian steel is being used. "When did these claims appear? At the moment we stopped buying from those guardrails," he said.