Bulgaria’s state natural gas monopoly Bulgargas raised sharply its pretax profit last year mostly due to increased transit of Russian gas to Balkan neighbours, the Energy Ministry reported last week. Bulgargas, which is Bulgaria’s single gas importer and owns the entire 2,200-kilometer (1,380-mile) pipeline network, registered a pretax profit of 163 million levs ($90.1 million) last year, up from 29 million levs in 2001, ministry data showed. “The main reasons for improved results were increased transit of gas and the weaker dollar, which reduced Bulgargas’s expenditure on buying gas,” Venislav Tsanev, head of the ministry’s economic policy department, said. He declined to give details about transported gas amounts last year. Bulgargas, for which Russia’s gas giant Gazprom is the only supplier, transported 12.7 billion cubic meters to Turkey, Greece and the Former Yogoslav Republic of Macedonia in 2002, up 7 percent from the previous year.