Euro Adoption Breakthrough Is Near, Bulgarian Central Bank Says.

Bulgaria’s efforts to set itself on a firm path to adopt the euro single currency have entered the “final stretch,” its central bank chief said.

“Bulgaria is really very close to a strategic breakthrough on its path of European integration,” Bulgarian National Bank Governor Dimitar Radev said Tuesday at a conference in Sofia, the country’s capital. Joining the pre-euro exchange-rate mechanism will mean that “things are becoming pretty much irreversible.”

The Balkan country has kept its finances stable in a bid to join the euro-area waiting room known as ERM-2, along with the bloc’s banking union, by end-April. The government is working to overcome earlier concern among euro members that letting it into the club would leave them exposed to a Greek-style sovereign-debt crisis or a money-laundering scandal akin to the string of crimes that originated in the Baltic countries.

With balanced budgets and the EU’s third-lowest level of public debt, Bulgaria fulfills the most formal requirements to adopt the euro, which it plans to do in early 2023. It operates with a fixed lev-euro rate, which both the government and the central bank plan to keep until the currency switch, Radev said.

Two Bulgarian lenders presented plans to the European Central Bank in November to address capital gaps found by the Frankfurt-based monetary authority. First Investment Bank AD, the country’s fifth-largest lender, in December, said that it will seek to raise as much as 200 million lev ($113 million) on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange