Unlike the pro-active approach to bringing foreign manufacturing investments into Macedonia developed by the Nikola Gruevski Government, German producer of pharmaceutical devices Gerrensheimer, who is the only major FDI completed under the Zoran Zaev term, did its own research and came to the country without being approached by the FDI teams.

The German company will open 400 jobs and invest several tens of millions of EUR in a producing facility near Skopje. Stage one should be completed by December, the company said yesterday, and Prime Minister Zaev was there to take credit for the deal.

But in fact, it was a Gerrensheimer consultant who proposed Macedonia as an investment destination, and company representatives then approached other foreign manufacturers operating in Macedonia. There was no business analysis offered by what is left of the specialized investment teams in the Government and no active measures on their part to bring the Germans here, who were left to gather all relevant information on their own.

Under the Gruevski Government, several designated ministers, often Macedonian Americans with experience in the business sector abroad, were tasked with going after companies interested in expanding in Europe, and specialized tax free industrial zones were being built on the idea that “if you build them, they will come”. At the height of this FDI boom, which ended with the 2015 political crisis sparked by Zaev, there was a significant foreign company opening its doors or breaking ground nearly each month. Now, SDSM officials are hard pressed to name a single investment they helped come to Macedonia, and Gerrensheimer is the only notable one to come in the two years of the Zaev regime. Zaev also has designated investment ministers, but by now even members of his Government acknowledge that nothing is being done in this regard and the economics team is performing badly.