Author: Goran Lefkov The case of the US investment bank Merrill Lynch in the 1990s brought new winds to the money industry. One of the 5 largest investment banks in the United States, Merrill Lynch, falsified documents for its managers and several other corrupt practices that go against the code of ethics that the bank itself had adopted. Thus, the bank entered into corruption scandals, which cost investors a...

Author: Goran Lefkov The Watergate scandal is one of the most notorious scandals in the United States in the last century. The event was named after the Democratic Party’s headquarters in Washington, DC, on June 17, 1972. It was an illegal intrusion into the headquarters of the party in which people from the administration of the then US President Richard Nixon were involved. Wiretapped materials were brought before the...

Goran Lefkov Vladimir Bukovsky was one of the most famous whistleblowers in the former Soviet Union. His heroic deed is that in the 1970s he handed over 150-page documents to Bill Cole, a CBS News correspondent in Moscow. The documents he handed over described in detail the psychiatric torture inflicted on dissidents and communist freedom fighters by the then-Soviet KGB. The actions took place in the Psychiatric Hospital in...

Goran Lefkov The last session of the first day of the conference was full of journalists. The session was led by the professor at the Faculty of Law in Skopje, i.e. the studies in journalism, Jasna Bachovska-Nedikj. In her introductory speech she mentioned that Macedonia had several good journalists who could cope with world standards, but that in general journalists were far from the required level. She mentioned that...

Goran Lefkov Former and current whistleblowers were present at the panel on the problems and challenges of whistleblowers in Macedonia. Aleksandar Bozhinovski, founder and one of the pioneers of whistleblowing in the non-governmental sector, opened the debate by describing the closeness between whistleblowers and journalists, especially investigative journalists. As a long-time investigative journalist, he emphasized that his experience had shown that without whistleblowers almost no major journalistic research would...

Goran Lefkov The benefits of the whistleblowers’ deeds are enormous. They save both time and money and resources of law enforcement agencies. In some cases they have far-reaching benefits, as was the case with Gjorgji Lazarevski and Zvonko Kostovski. With their heroism, an entire country managed to get rid of a dictatorship. There was a similar session on the World Whistleblowers Day organized in Skopje. The Coordinator of Southeast...

Goran Lefkov In 2019 the European Union adopted a new directive on whistleblowing and whistleblowers’ protection. That directive prescribes special conditions for whistleblowers’ protection in various areas of daily life. An interesting point in this session was that more than half of the speakers in this session were people who have been through whistleblowing as a process. Some of them before the adoption of the whistleblower law in 2015,...