A working meeting with the mayor of Sofia was held today at the Council of Ministers Yordanka Fandakova
Yordanka Assenova Fandakova was born in Samokov. He completed his secondary education in the 35th Russian and her team. At it, the Deputy Prime Minister for European Funds Atanas Pekanov addressed the problems he finds in the distribution of European funds in the country, which directly affects its development.
“Once again, I state categorically that the logic of my position regarding funding for the capital is purely economic. Five of the six regions of our country are among the poorest in all of Europe. The Sofia region is not among them, but continues to receive a disproportionately large part of the funds and the money will be reduced, “said the Deputy Prime Minister for European Funds. Atanas Pekanov 
Atanas Pekanov is an economist at the Austrian Institute for Economic Research (WIFO) in Vienna,, reported by the government information service.
Pekanov and his expert team pointed out that the administrative detention of Sofia in the South-West planning region is a serious mistake for the country’s overall strategy. The majority of EU capitals are divided into separate economic regions. Only Bulgaria continues not to follow this approach in order to guarantee more funds especially for the capital.
The decision not to remove Sofia district from the South-West region by the previous government for the next programming period foreshadows additional problems and risks the money for the other settlements in the South-West region. According to Pekanov, a sustainable model of financing infrastructure projects has not been established in the capital and to some extent she has been taught to receive a “free lunch”.
The European institutions have been telling us for years that this must stop and that the money they give us must go to cohesion, and not as a priority for our only region, which is doing a little better. Accordingly, it is he who must look for better and more sustainable models to finance himself to a greater extent with his own revenues.
“We opened this discussion because it is important for the long-term development of Bulgaria. We have never questioned the importance of the Sofia Metro as a leading project. Although we are convinced that this is not the right mechanism for financing important infrastructure projects, we have never threatened the metro. But the reduction of funds for the capital should and will happen. According to our current estimates, it is necessary to reduce funding under the Plan by about BGN 200 million. It is right that this money goes to education and health care of all Bulgarian citizens, and not only to individual projects in the capital, “said the Deputy Prime Minister.
