Bulgarian Reality

Experts from the European Anti-Fraud Office (Olaf) became the latest victim of the unfair competition between Bulgarian taxi drivers, Bulgarian news agency Blitz said on April 3 2009.

Olaf experts arrived in Bulgaria to take part in a seminar on fighting fraud in the EU. They took a taxi from the airport to central Sofia and were presented with a bill for 102 leva (about 50 euro), Blitz said.

Suspecting that there was something odd about the bill, Olaf experts complained to their host in Bulgaria, the Prosecutor-General's Office, which then did a check on the taxi company, OK Superchance.

The check showed that the bill was correct, and that the company had stated the price of 8.60 leva a kilometre.

By contrast, OK Supertrans, one of two companies contracted to service the airport, charges about 0.60 leva a kilometre.

In October 2008, David Hammerstein, Spanish member of the European Parliament for the European Greens, was charged 105 leva by a taxi driver in Sofia for the distance between Sofia airport and the Government building in central Sofia.

My first impression of the country was the 105 leva I was charged by the taxi driver and the dubious receipt I got at the end," he told reporters. When Hammerstein asked Bulgaria's Transport Minister Petar Moutafchiev about the issue, the response he got was that nothing could be done.

[By almost any measure, Bulgaria is considered the most corrupt country in the 27-member European Union.]