For a year and three months, taxpayers in Gabrovo have paid 81,000 BGN for trips undertaken by municipal officials. The amount is not particularly large to attract media attention, if the municipality had not concealed details about who traveled, where, why, and how long the trips lasted.
This becomes clear from the response to an access to information request. The report provided to “Za Istinata” (“For the truth”) appears detailed at first glance—several pages listing dates, amounts spent, and the order number for each official trip. The municipality has definitely been excessive, unless this is an attempt to hide the details.
What “Za Istinata” (“For the truth”) requested:
- The total funds spent on travel by municipal officials and councilors of Gabrovo Municipality within the country and abroad from the beginning of 2024 to the date of this request (May 7th, this year).
- The report should be organized by date, destination, purpose of the trip, and expenses, including travel and per diems.
What the Gabrovo Municipality provided:
A report organized by date, including three additional columns. One column shows the daily allowances paid to the officials, another displays the amounts paid for travel and overnight stays, and the last contains the order numbers for each trip.
However, from these orders, it is not clear where the trips took place, for how long, or for what purpose. All of this should have been detailed in the trip orders, and “Za Istina” specifically requested this information, but what we received were only the order numbers and dates. As such, the provided data is neither specific nor complete, as stated in the decision authorizing its release, signed by Mayor Tanya Hristova.
What can be inferred from it is that municipal officials traveled at the expense of the city budget, but only they know where they were and what impact these trips had on the municipality and its citizens.
The information is too general — it only shows that between January 2024 and May 2025, Gabrovo Municipality allocated about 45,000 BGN for foreign trips:
- About 11,000 BGN were paid as per diems,
- Nearly 33,000 BGN covered airline tickets and overnight stays.
- For domestic trips, 19,000 BGN were spent, including just over 3,600 BGN for daily allowances and nearly 14,000 BGN for travel expenses.
It turns out that the secret was embedded even in the technical specifications of the public procurement for “Provision of airline tickets for air travel of passengers and baggage on official trips abroad for the needs of Gabrovo Municipality.” The specifications stated that the “tour operator must ensure the confidentiality of the trips – passengers, dates, routes, carriers, etc., and not disclose information to third parties.”
The value of this public procurement, announced at the end of 2024, is 195,000 BGN for a period of two years. However, the notice states that Gabrovo Municipality is not obliged to purchase airline tickets for the total contract amount. The funds for the contract with the tour operator come from the city budget as well as from externally financed project budgets.
The documentation for this tender is public but not in its full scope. It turns out that a significant part of it is considered a “trade secret.”
One penny — the cost for issuing an airline ticket — is the price offered by four out of five participating companies in their bids.
“Za Istina” checked what this fee includes in a randomly selected tour operator. It is the actual price paid by the client for the service received, which covers everything from purchasing the ticket to the end of the journey.
The tour operator’s service includes issuing the ticket, monitoring the reservation, reacting to schedule changes or cancellations, finding the best connecting flights, assisting with check-in and boarding pass issuance. For corporate clients, they also provide payment reports. Since airlines do not commission travel agencies for issuing tickets, the agencies add a service fee, explains a staff member at the tour agency. In the case of Gabrovo, this fee is just one penny.
How would a staff member from an arbitrarily chosen agency comment on this? “It’s unserious,” he says concisely.
Because four of the five tour operators involved in the Gabrovo Municipality’s procurement all quote the same one-cent fee for issuing a flight ticket, the evaluation committee requires each bidder to provide a detailed written explanation of how this fee was calculated.
Every one of the four companies provides information, but according to the minutes from the evaluation committee, the justification is considered confidential because it contains data on their trade policy. They cite Article 102, Paragraph 1 of the Public Procurement Law (PPL), and the committee accepts this as an argument.
However, the participants and the municipal committee interpret the PPL selectively.
The legal basis of Article 102, Paragraph 1, indeed allows each participant in the procedure to specify in their participation or bid application information they consider confidential due to trade secrets.
But Article 102 also has Paragraph 2, which the municipal committee neglects. This paragraph states: “Participants cannot invoke confidentiality regarding the proposals in their bids that are subject to evaluation.”
This is precisely the case here. The ranking of the bids is based on the lowest proposed price, with the evaluation criterion being the fee for issuing a flight ticket. The announcement for the procedure is titled “Provision of airline tickets for air travel of passengers and baggage on official trips abroad for the needs of Gabrovo Municipality.” When price is the evaluation criterion—and in this case, the only one—the amount and the way it is calculated cannot be secret, and there is ample judicial practice in our country, even at the regional level, supporting this.
In a decision from November of last year, the Gabrovo Administrative Court rejected a similar case where the Gabrovo Municipality refused “Za Istina” access to a schedule for an infrastructure project, classified as a trade secret. The court noted that “even if a trade secret exists,” citizens have the right to information to form an opinion on how the municipality is functioning. Such access is not an end in itself but serves to increase trust in institutions, their transparency and accountability, and ultimately reveal cases of corruption and abuse of power.
