Outraged artists called Glavchev, and he ordered inspections
Theater directors should have a budget divided into monthly limits that cannot be exceeded. This financing scheme will be proposed by the Minister of Culture Nayden Todorov after the scandals that broke out with the huge sums paid to supposed employees in the theaters in Razgrad and Smolyan.
The prosecutor’s office discovered that 41 builders, cooks and unemployed people “played” in the philharmonic hall in Razgrad, being fictitiously assigned to work for a month. According to payroll, they received tens of thousands of BGN salaries. According to the prosecutor’s office, BGN 937,889 were thus siphoned off from the state enterprise. The head of the theater – the conductor Levon Manukyan – was fired and arrested. However, he was released from custody on Monday evening in exchange for BGN 50,000, which he paid on Wednesday.
A similar scheme was established in the theater in Smolyan. Due to poor health, the director Rumen Bechev was released for 15,000 BGN.
Changes in the way of financing will be made to stop these schemes, assured Todorov. “The delegated budget will not be changed as delegated, but the recalculation period will be changed to one year so that the directors and the ministry will know within one year what the full budget available to the institute is. It should be divided into monthly limits and the director should operate within the monthly limit and not be able to exceed it”, is the idea of the minister.
“I am convinced that if there were problems in the ministry, they were not intentional. Rather, it could be a matter of oversight, which should not happen, because these amounts for Razgrad and Smolyan were not released as large sums at once,” he explained.
Prime Minister Dimitar Glavchev expects more energetic actions from the Ministry of Culture regarding the “theatre affair”
“It is absolutely unacceptable that the theater community and the thousands of artists in the field of culture bear a burden that they did not deserve. I have hundreds of calls in this direction. I, for my part, have assigned the Chief Inspectorate to the Council of Ministers to also carry out an inspection”, said the acting Prime Minister.