The move by Deputy Prime Minister Fatmir Bytyqi to address companies who won public grants and to ask for their support is scandalous, said VMRO-DPMNE president Hristijan Mickoski in a Sitel TV interview.

Bytyqi sent a letter to companies that were part of one of the rounds of financial assistance given over the Covid and the Ukraine crises, and insisted that they should now support SDSM.

It was shocking. In the past we had criminal investigations against people who did nothing, who received no political gain, accused of abuse of office. And today we have a Deputy Prime Minister send out a letter asking for political gains, demanding votes, because he helped some companies make financial gains. And the prosecutors are nowhere to be seen. If there is no investigation in this scandal, it will just prove the reality that we have a partisan driven judiciary, Mickoski said.