Bulgaarse justitie geeft groen licht voor kandidaat-eurocommissaris Jeleva (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Concerns about Rumiana Jeleva i's competence are set to come to the fore as documents emerge appearing to exonerate the Bulgarian nominee in terms of financial disclosure.
The Bulgarian government is set to announce on Friday (15 January) that Ms Jeleva did not break Bulgarian law in failing to declare her stake in Global Consult, a privatisation firm, when she became an MEP in 2007, local media report.
A document signed by Bulgarian deputy justice minister, Lyudmila Petrova, and leaked to press on Thursday states that the Prevention and Exposure of Conflict of Interests Act only came into force on 1 January 2009, meaning that Ms Jeleva was under no obligation to disclose the information when she was elected.
The EU i parliament's legal services are currently studying other papers in the case ahead of the plenary session in Strasbourg next week. MEPs have also asked the EU commission to reveal if its internal audit of Ms Jeleva revealed any irregularities.
The controversy has unfolded following a hearing in the EU parliament on Tuesday to check if the 40-year-old Bulgarian foreign minister is suitable to become commissioner for humanitarian aid.
Global Consult aside, Ms Jeleva's remarks on her portfolio also drew criticism from MEPs, who said she showed poor grasp of detail and lacked vision for the job.
At one point Ms Jeleva said that she would be willing to talk to "moderate Taliban" and visit crisis hotspots such as Somalia - comments which indicate a weak understanding of the role of EU commissioners and of the dangerous situation in the failed African state.
Senior members of the Socialist group in the EU parliament have already begun to switch their focus from Ms Jeleva's financial declaration to the question of merit.
"Apart from the financial story, she had the weakest presentation, way below the necessary standards," Austrian centre-left MEP Hannes Swoboda said in the Wiener Zeitung newspaper on Friday.
"I fear that a second hearing will be worse than the first," the leader of the Socialist group, German MEP Martin Schulz, said on Thursday. "Her performance showed beyond doubt that she is incompetent."
The Jeleva controversy has also pitted Mr Schulz against Bulgaria's centre-right prime minister, Boyko Borisov i, who in recent days described the affair as a socialist plot and called centre-left MEPs "troublemakers." "You don't do such things to a woman," he said.
On Thursday afternoon Mr Schulz fired back in a jibe about Mr Borisov's past: "The former bodyguard of the former communist dictator of Bulgaria has no right to attack us in such a way."
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