Ministry of Transport, Information Technology and Communications

Executive Agency “Maritime Administration” inspected 528 ships according to the Paris MoU in 2011

Bulgaria had the task to reach 331 inspections, and its results represent 159.52% of the targets. This ranks Bulgaria among the first of all member states of the Memorandum.

These checks are part of the new inspection regime of the Paris Memorandum on Port State Control, which came into force in 2011. Their goal is to achieve a stricter checks of ships with bad safety performance and to ease the inspection regime for the rest. In this regard, the vessels are divided into two priorities for each Member State of the memorandum should cover a minimum number of checks on each of them.

The results for the contribution of the Bulgarian administration in the implementation of the new regime for the first year indicate that 273 pieces of Priority 1 and 255 - in priority 2 had been inspected. This means that the percentage of lost ships is 0% (eligible for 5%) for the first and 0.50% (at a rate of 10%) in the second priority. Leading maritime administrations had failed to inspect even half the statutory number of ships and the deviations from the norms of the two priorities are at times.

These results help strengthening the role of the Bulgarian Maritime Administration at a regional and international level. Among the good results on an international level are the positive evaluations from the European Commission in connection with bulgarian ports and ships’ security.