Bulgaria Gov't Seeks to Reinstate Rumen Porozhanov as Agriculture Fund Head

The candidacy of former interim Finance Minister Rumen Porozhanov to take over the State Agriculture Fund (SFA), Agriculture Minister Desislava Taneva has said.

Alongside having headed the Finance Ministry intil early in November, when the new government was sworn in, Porozhanov was CEO of the SFA between 2011-2013, when he resigned allegedly under pressure from the then-ruling socialist-liberal government.

Porozhanov was appointed by conservative GERB's previous government in 2011.

Taneva's announcement comes against the backdrop of a ruling by the Sofia Regional Court that the former CEO at the fund, Miroslav Nikolov, who was replaced earlier this year by the socialist-led cabinet (the same under which Porozhanov had stepped down), was to head the SFA again.

On Saturday Taneva aslo told reporters a number of reforms were to be carried out to prevent illegal logging across the country by creating 137 "mobile groups" across the country. In Taneva's words, some 1-2 million cubic meters of wood had been illegally cut down out of the total eight million, the volume of wood material annually logged in Bulgaria.