Category: Research

Board members live luxuriously; companies do not have for salaries and new mechanization

Winter 2015. An idyllic picture in Macedonia. Snow-covered land, impassable roads and many villages cut off. The public enterprise Makedonija Pat has no money for new machinery, but has money to give to the managing board exceeding the number of people under the law. Namely, the Board of Directors of this public company has 13 members, which is illegal. Using the legal right to free access to public information,...

Board members and officials: receiving both salaries and honoraria

DOCUMENTATION   Nebojsa Stajkovic has been a non-executive member of the Board of Directors of “Macedonian Telecom” AD Skopje since April this year, after previously, since 2009, he had performed the same function in “T-Mobile” Macedonia AD Skopje. In the past 9 years at the same time he has been working as assistant minister in the Ministry of Interior (MOI) responsible for IT and telecommunications. Seemingly, nothing at stake...

Problematic players in the casino business

Owners of casinos in Macedonia are problematic. With imported hundreds of millions of Euros to the Macedonian border with Greece, casinos remind of gambling mecca, such as Macau, Estonia or Las Vegas. But what do heads of the gambling industry hide? Center for Investigative Journalism SCOOP Macedonia investigated the conflicts with the law of the owners of temples of dice in Macedonia, casinos Flamingo and Princess, as second part...

Macedonia becomes Balkan Las Vegas: low standards and too much gambling

  DOCUMENTS (Note: Documents for all companies are attached on links to their names. To view them click on link DOCUMENTS)     Macedonia is at the bottom of the list of Balkan countries by foreign direct investments. Official figures show that in 2013 Macedonia attracted only 251 million Euros foreign investments, Montenegro 350 million, Bosnia and Herzegovina 300 million, while the same year Kosovo registered 259 million Euros....

Poor municipalities hinder development outside the capital

Failing to comply with the Law on Balanced Regional Development and taking money from the concession of natural resources, the state economically exhausts the municipalities. These conditions revolt citizens from other towns. Stojan from Kocani is unhappy how the state allocates money. “Everything is built in Skopje. Nothing in the other parts of Macedonia. It seems that once Skopje 2014 has been launched, no penny has been given apart...

Мunicipalities operate only for administration’s salaries, not for the citizens

Instead of government closer to citizens, municipalities are increasingly becoming institutions operating only for administration’s salaries. The investigation by SCOOP Macedonia shows that the increase in the number of employees before each cycle of local elections has led to a situation where more municipalities encash taxes and generate income only for employees’ salaries. Very few funds remain for paving streets, maintaining parks, schools or other areas important to the citizens....

Party employment for dysfunctional municipalities

Municipality Rankovce is a leader by the number of employees in Macedonia. For 10 years this community has increased its staff by five times. In 2005 the municipality had 6 employees, while in 2014 their number rose to 31 people. Municipality Dolneni has had the same recruitment process for the past 10 years as Rankovce. But unlike Rankovce, this Pelagonija municipality has three times more inhabitants than Rankovce. Third...

Babies die due to bureaucratic obstacles

Petar is a young, 30-year-old man from a town in Macedonia. We met him to tell us the agony he went through trying to ensure prompt transport for operation of his newborn in Bulgaria. He excitedly tells what mazes he went through in those 7 days after the birth of his second child, who immediately after his birth had heart defect detected and a breathing problem. Hospital costs per...