1,000 train wagons missing from Bulgaria's railways

Bulgaria's heavily indebted state railway company BDZ has found it cannot locate 1,000 of its train wagons, Transport Minister Ivaylo Moskovski said Wednesday, citing possible corruption.

"It turns out that 1,000 wagons are missing even if they are listed as company assets of the BDZ," Moskovski told 24 Hours newspaper in an interview.

He said he would alert prosecutors about the find, suspecting "corrupt practices."

Several hundred BDZ cargo wagons were simply abandoned in Serbia in the 1990s, where they had been used for smuggling fuel and other goods during the embargo against Slobodan Milosevic's regime, Finance Minister Simeon Djankov said recently.

Other wagons were meanwhile stolen, dismantled and sold for scrap metal, press reports said.

Several years ago, the government imposed stricter requirements for scrap collecting companies to combat widespread thefts of railway equipment, electric cables and other metallic infrastructure parts that poor Bulgarians, mostly of the Roma minority, sold for scrap to make a living.

The ailing BDZ has outstanding debts of 771 million leva (394 million euros, ê529.6 million), finance ministry data showed last week, when the government held several rounds of talks with BDZ executives and trade unions to prevent a looming nationwide rail strike.

The government insists that BDZ push on with a restructuring programme involving personnel cuts and the privatisation of cargo operations to help it out of the red, before negotiating a 240-million-euro World Bank loan for the company.