Bulgaria with Counter-Proposals to the Mobility Package

Hours after the meeting with Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Boyko Borissov and EU Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc on 15^th of May, Bulgaria has counter-proposals to the Mobility Package.

Bulgaria draft proposals include TIR lorry drivers themselves to decide whether to use their weekly rest or not, and the EU to build special guarded parking lots for this purpose. Carriers remain firm that they will protest on May 17, along with the EU-Western Balkans Summit in Sofia.

Bulgaria will make four counter-proposals to the Mobility Package, Bulgaria’s Transport Minister Ivaylo Moskovski said. Instead of TIR drivers returning to their country every three weeks, Bulgaria suggests that that it should be the company’s obligation to provide the possibility for the driver to choose whether to return to the home country or to go to a facility of the company, if it has such somewhere, but it should be the driver’s right to choose whether to do so or spend the rest period at a place of his/her choice.

Until the EU builds guarded parking lots with proper illumination, drivers should have the right to rest in the cabins, as it is now (the second proposal of Bulgaria). And thirdly, drivers should receive per diems at the same size as the drivers in the country where they are, arrive 7 or 9 days after the start of the transport course, and not after the third, as the EC suggests.

If Bulgaria's draft proposals are not accepted, however, over 70,000 transport companies from Bulgaria and hundreds of thousands of the whole of Central and Eastern Europe will face bankruptcy, the carriers announced and their drivers would emigrate to work in the West.

Yordan Arabadzhiev, secretary of the Union of International Carriers: “For us, these changes are rather a plan to provide personnel for the transport industry in Old Europe at the cost of destroying the companies in Central and Eastern Europe.”

To claim their demands on 17^th of May, thousands of carriers with more than 100 lorries will protest in Sofia. An automobile procession is scheduled from 10 am to 5 pm on Tsarigradsko shosse Blvd., from the exit to Brussels Blvd. in the direction to Sofia.

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