• The activities of the leadership of the Ministry of Defence were made much more public. This improved the relations of the political leadership of defence with the expectations of the public
• Put into law that any defence contract over €50 million should be approved by parliament
• Developed an Ethical Code of Conduct for the military and civilian personnel
• Introduced specialised training in anti-corruption practices
• Implemented rules on preventing and determining conflicts of interest
• Changed the internal rules on publication entirely: because everything was previously confidential or secret and nothing was published on the MOD website
• Changed the rules for the so-called “special procurement” for secret tenders. For the first time ever information about special tenders could be found on the website.
• Created a strategy for the management of surplus property and published on the webpage the complete list of real estate.

The Bulgarian government of 2009-2013, led by the GERB party, was strongly focused on anti-corruption. Bulgaria had just had some of its EU funding cut off due to lack of progress on tackling corruption. The focus was especially strong in the Defence Ministry, whose senior leadership had already developed an anti-corruption strategy in 2008, ready to implement in 2009 were they to be elected.  Theirs was a broad initiative, attacking corruption on almost all fronts, using the new NATO-TI integrity-building tools, encouraging external media and NGO engagement, being highly transparent.  TI-DSP actively supported the anti-corruption initiative, mentoring the leadership, assisting with training and facilitating leadership events.

The successes and failures of the initiative are described in some detail in a detailed interview with the Deputy Defence Minister[1].

To what effect?

The GERB government resigned in 2013, and the successor administration reversed a number of the reforms. My own conclusion is that they tried to do too much with a Ministry and military that still had deep ‘particularistic’ roots, with insufficient time. They could have been faster in the first year – Minister Tzvetkova comments that perhaps she tried too hard to convince the 100 Division Chiefs of the merits of reform and was thus too slow to dismiss those resistant to change – but it seems to me that they were pretty quick nonetheless, having already pre-prepared their plans. Minister Tzvetkova’s own assessment is that she was halfway through their reform programme when the GERB government fell. There is a parallel to TI’s defence work in Colombia in 2006/7/8 (see below), where the Defence Minister commented that one electoral cycle was insufficient time for a full, range of anti-corruption reforms in the Ministry. She thought that real cultural change would take 4-6 years, meaning that two cycles were required, on the basis that the first and last years in each electoral cycle would be taken up with campaigning or getting (re)established.