Kancheska overnight at Hilton, Sheraton and Ritz and shopping at “Versace”

DOCUMENTATION Four thousand and three hundred Euros from the personal card of former Minister of Culture to goverment of Republic of Macedonia, Elizabeta Kanchevska Milevska were transferred to the account of the famous hotel chain Hilton in just one day. However, not from her private account, but from the account of the budget filled by the citizens of the Republic of Macedonia. Yet Hilton was not the only destination...

REPRESENTATION 2: RESTAURANT INVOICES ARE HIDDEN AS IF THEY WERE A STATE SECRET

authors: Bjanka Stankovich, Angela Petrovska and Angela Rajchevska (here you can read Part One) Searching for the true picture of how rationally the municipal bureaucracy behaves and whether for the citizens’ benefit, the SCOOP research team visited several municipalities. Under the Law on Free Access to Information, it addressed all 82 municipalities. From most of them we received data and documents on how and what the mayors and their...

Representation: Empty holes for full stomachs

DOCUMENTATION authors: Bjanka Stankovich, Angela Petrovska and Angela Rajchevska   Fifty cuts of lamb cost 17,500 denars, 30 pieces of white cheese – 7,500 denars, and ten kilograms of hard cheese – 3,880 denars. A total of 30,324 denars, or 500 Euros were paid by the municipality of Ohrid to the company Kamimpex for an undefined “catering” service. But this is not the record of the Ohrid administration. In...

Project on establishing good governance standards in municipalities across Macedonia

14 civil organizations signed Tuesday contracts for grants as part of an EU-funded project on establishing good governance standards in local self-government units based on the so called SIGMA principles of public administration. The project “Monitoring of principles of public administration in preserving good governance values” is implemented by the Center for Change Management in Skopje in partnership with the association for management consulting MKA-2000 and the Center for Investigative...

State institutions were charged 10 times more for heating

SCOOP team reviewed all whistleblower’s findings. We decided to ask him for a meeting to see if these clues were real. After long persuasion and guarantees for protection of his identity, we met in a restaurant at the exit of Skopje. After a short wait, a middle-aged man appeared, visibly frightened for his safety. However, we could notice his determination to share all information of general interest with the...

A year after SCOOP’s warning: the government will be saving the UEFA Super Cup

Last night the Government of the Republic of Macedonia announced that there were serious failures in the realization of the undertaken obligations to host the UEFA Super Cup at the Arena “Filip II” so the organization of the big event in Skopje has been questioned. It results from the letter that UEFA delivered to the Football Federation of Macedonia. In fact, this is UEFA’s new letter. The first one was...

UNESCO: Stop the Galicica ski-center and highway plans

UNESCO has published the report on the extent of conservation in areas declared as World Heritage Sites, Ohrid condition is regarded as vulnerable and the main reason for the possible degradation are the envisaged infrastructure projects. Macedonia has two years to save its only World Heritage Site. SCOOP has already warned of this in its two documentaries “The Lake facing destruction, institutions only think of profit” and “Lake Ohrid...

Cardboard for Curtains: Life in Macedonia’s Hospitals

April. For many it’s the best time of year, when people wake from a cold and long winter. For others, such as nurse Hava Sait Nexhip, it means the beginning of an annual, months-long water shortage at the medical campus outside Skopje where she has worked for eight years. “Each April till September we don’t have water,” Sait Nexhip says, though she can offer no explanation. “But this year...