site.btaPM, Finance Minister Meet with Maritsa East Mines Management, Workers

A working meeting was held Friday between Prime Minister Kiril Petkov, Finance Minister Assen Vassilev and top managers of the Maritsa-East Mines. At the meeting, the director of the mining company, Ilsa Chinkova, and her deputies, Ivan Arseniev and Dimiter Cholakov, said that the war in Ukraine has rendered impossible the delivery of metals and spare parts for the mines while at the same time prices of inputs increase with the end result that repair works in the pits have been blocked. 

Petkov undertook to seek a solution to the problem and recommended that the new contracts with suppliers scrap intermediaries, as in his words this makes things 20 per cent more expensive. 

The Prime Minister concurred with the management of the mines that is it is inadmissible to be in a situation where the cheapest energy sources are mined in the Maritsa-East complex while at the same time the electricity produced by its power plants is the most expensive. 

Chinkova said that since 2014 to date the price of a tonne of lignite coal has been changed only last month, resulting in a small increase. Chinkova said that no effort will be spared to resume the repair works in the mines and that the company will extract record-high quantities of coal by the end of the year. 

A working meeting was also held in the Troyanovo 1 pit which in March marked the 70th anniversary since the start of extraction of lignite coal. The pit provides the raw material to the Maritsa East 2 thermo-electric plant which is the biggest such facility on the Balkans. 

Petkov and Vassilev also conferred with miners and offered assurance that the energy complex can continue to work normally and undergo transformation in the future. Petkov once again noted that the National Recovery and Resilience Plan does not contain a commitment for closure of thermo-electric power plants. 

Vassilev for his part said that much funding has been earmarked in the Plan for Just Transition to help provide additional jobs that are well paid so as to have "a normal and smooth transition". Vassilev said that the government will continue to provide compensations to businesses to offset the high prices of electricity purchased on the free market until a sustainable mechanism is worked out. Work on such a mechanism is underway, he said.