Bulgaria may cancel construction
of a 4-billion-euro ($5.5 billion) nuclear power station and sell
shares in its state-run energy utilities to plug a widening deficit,
according to Deputy Prime Minister Simeon Djankov. Djankov, 39, a
former chief economist at the World Bank, is also finance minister in
the government of Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who took office July
27.
Borisov ousted a Socialist-led coalition in July 5 elections,
pledging to fight corruption and pull the European Union's poorest
nation out of recession. The new government's plan to balance the
budget by the end of this year may
halt the planned reactor at Belene on the Danube River, in which
Germany's RWE AG is a partner. Djankov is seeking to raise cash from
assets to bridge a 2.5-billion-lev ($1.8 billion) budget gap,
Bulgaria's first in eight years, and says spending cuts also will be
needed.
«There is an 80 percent chance that the Belene project will be
stopped,» Djankov said in an interview. «The state has no funds to
spare for its construction
and it has been difficult to raise private funds because of the global
crisis.» There is no economic assessment of the project's profitability
and legal analysis showed there would be no penalties if it was
canceled, he said. Bulgaria
selected RWE, Germany's second-largest utility, last year to develop
and manage the 2,000-megawatt plant. The government also hired BNP
Paribas SA, France's largest bank by market value, to arrange a
250-million-euro loan to help fund construction.