There is coordination to control Bulgarian food and from there to control the vote. This opinion was expressed to the Bulgarian National Radio by the former Deputy Minister of Agriculture Ivan Hristanov, leader of the "Unity" party.
"There is coordination between the draft law of the Ministry of Agriculture and Delyan Peevski's proposal for shops in post offices. I ask myself the question: is someone trying to control the distribution and trade in food and what is this control for? Could it be in the same way that they took control of the distribution of media 10-15 years ago, control over the prosecutor's office, over the management levels of the services and the Ministry of Interior. I'm starting to think that this is the ultimate goal - mastering Bulgarian food and from there it's already very easy to control the elections. Because, if the post office in the village of Izgrev sells food, everyone reports to the post office every day and you can always make a little scheme, such schemes were revealed during the elections, with free food packages or the so-called coffee for 200 leva. This model immediately makes money and becomes a tool for buying elections", said Hristanov.
The opening of state-owned shops in local post offices will put pressure on all trade and will bankrupt other retail outlets, he believes: "In the end, we will be left with only the post offices and there will be no retail network at all. Post offices cannot compete with retail chains, so how will they lower prices? Post offices will compete with small retail outlets and it will have the same devastating effect that we had years ago with the "Lafka" chain. When the regulatory authorities - the CPC, the CPC and the BFSA - we will not have these anomalies that are visible now.
In the words of the leader of "Edinenie", the proposal of the Ministry of Agriculture for at least 50% of food products sold in large retail chains to be of Bulgarian origin and for a 20 percent ceiling on markups is in violation of the Constitution, where in Art. 19, para. 1 it is stated that the economy of the Republic of Bulgaria is based on free economic initiative.
"Colleagues in the Ministry of Agriculture are embarrassed. The Ministry of Economy does not want to deal with it at all, they do not support this idea internally. I do not know how this will go in the so-called coalition council. They are retreating because they are aware of what this means. Such kind of Bolshevik interventions usually make things worse. "What the Ministry of Agriculture has communicated so far about this bill is full of internal contradictions," Ivan Hristanov also said.