Press Release: State aid: Commission orders Bulgaria to recover incompatible State aid granted to certain parties to forest swap transactions

After an in-depth investigation, the European Commission concluded on the 5 September 2014 that a Bulgarian law that allowed the swapping of privately-owned against publicly-owned forest land was incompatible with EU State aid rules. The law, which was in force at the time of Bulgaria's accession to the EU in January 2007 until January 2009, conferred a selective advantage on undertakings which benefitted from these forest swap transactions, distorting competition in the Single Market. Bulgaria must now either recover the incompatible State aid from the companies that received it or undo the swaps concerned.

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