Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski accused the previous Government of serious abuse of public funds and mismanagement of state ran enterprises. In the biggest such enterprise, the ELEM/ESM energy company, Mickoski said that one two year contract cost ELEM 40 million EUR.
No normal or sane businessman would have signed a contract like that, Mickoski said in a Fokus magazine interview.
In another instance, Mickoski said that the Government signed off on a project to build the long delayed railroad to Bulgaria, for a total of 560 million EUR, without previously reaching an agreement with Bulgaria that they will finish the line at their end. As it stands, the project provides for a dead-end tunnel with no exit, ending deep in the Osogovo mountains on the Macedonian side. “360 million EUR are our taxpayers’ money and 200 million would be an EU grant. But the project is marked RED FIDIC, and any engineer knows that such projects can balloon in cost, in this case up to 750-800 million EUR. The plan provides that we demolish 20 homes in Kriva Palanka, pay half a billion EUR of our people’s money for 24 kilometers of railway, and finish in a dead-end street, with half a tunnel”.
Regarding the large Bechtel contract, Mickoski said that at the moment there is no work on the ground, and that there is serious suspicion that the money already paid out to the company were abused.
The Prime Minister warned that important companies, such as the national forests company, were left without money for salaries of their employees, with invoices that show prices two of three times higher than the regular prices.
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