EU budget commissioner Piotr Serafin will visit Bulgaria on Thursday and Friday, 29 and 30 October, to discuss the EU's next long-term budget for 2028-2034, the European Commission's office in Bulgaria said.
Serafin is also responsible for the fight against fraud and for public administration. Bulgaria is a stop on his tour of Europe, where he is consulting member states on the new budget. He has visited 22 EU countries since he took the post.
On Thursday he will meet prime minister Rumen Radev, deputy prime minister and finance minister Galab Donev, and deputy prime minister for EU funds Atanas Pekanov.
At 10:00 the same day, he will open a conference in Sofia called "The next multiannual financial framework: priorities and principles". It is hosted by the Commission's office in Bulgaria, Poland's embassy and the Sofia office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
On Friday Serafin will talk with representatives of the National Association of Municipalities about the place of regions in the national and regional partnership plans under the next EU budget.
He will then meet Bulgarian tech companies with Pekanov and look at projects funded by the EU budget.
The Commission says Serafin's talks in EU countries have fed into the guidelines and priorities in its budget proposal. The topic raised most often is the urgent need to simplify complex funding procedures, with a lighter administrative burden and more transparency.
Interested parties are pressing for fewer overlapping rules and better legal consistency, so they can find their way more easily around the EU funding system.