The former director of the Forestry Executive Agency and former member of parliament, Alexander Dunchev, announced on the Facebook social network that he is starting the „Is there a way and is there a who?“ column. His idea is that, through it, citizens and journalists can arm themselves with specific questions to the candidates for MPs on environmental protection policies that are of great public interest.
So Dunchev is today visiting the village of German next to Pancharevo Lake. There are still two pine forests that have not been cut down and are not built on, which cover an area of nearly 100 acres. Upon their complaint in 2014, they were identified by the European Commission as part of the illegal replacement of over 20,000 decares of state forests throughout Bulgaria.
Dunchev also announced that in 2019 Green Laws calculated that the state lost BGN 30 million from the replacement of just these 2 forests in favor of the construction companies MIX-PS OOD and Invest Stroi 7 EOOD.
“Since 2019, we have been fighting to get the state to correctly assess this loss and to collect either the BGN 30 million, or to cancel the substitutes, as we also introduced a law to cancel the substitutes, but to no avail. At that time, private companies legalized most substitutes one by one in court. In this case, the two private construction companies are condemning the state with the arguments that they were not „commercial enterprises“ (a complete lie) and that the market valuations (which are already tenfold lower by the Ministry of Agriculture!!) were not made by an independent valuer, but by a company of the Ministry of Agriculture (this is a real problem that we have been raising the alarm about since 2018)”, Dunchev also announced.
According to him, there is still a chance to save both these pine forests above German and the remaining 20,000 decares from being cut down and built on, but the National Assembly must have deputies who can answer the following questions:
1. Will you insist that the National Assembly upholds the ban on replacement forests in the Forestry Act 2011, even if the court legalizes all replacements due to controversial actions by the Ministry of Agriculture?
2. Will you insist that the People’s Assembly adopt rules in the General Assembly to cancel all forest replacements in view of the risk of being legalized by the court due to controversial actions of the Ministry of Agriculture?
3. Will you make the Ministry of Agriculture prepare new real independent market evaluations of all substitutes, with full transparency and using methods used by banking institutions, which will prove that the substitutes are a theft of over 1 billion BGN, as we calculated from „Greens“ Laws“ as early as 2019, and be repealed once and for all?
