Vladimir Todorovik, owner of the large Tinex supermarket chain and former Mayor of Skopje’s Centar municipality, was ordered into house arrest yesterday, while another former Centar official, Vladimir Zdravev, and several associates, were sent to detention.
They are charged in a newly revealed case that was allegedly part of the massive campaign of politically motivated persecution of VMRO-DPMNE officials, meant to bring down the Gruevski Government and force Macedonia to rename itself. Gruevski is also charged in this new case, but he is protected by political asylum in Hungary, as is his former key deputy Zoran Stavrevski and former Culture Minister Elizabeta Kanceska Milevska.

The group is charged by prosecutor Ljubomir Lape with irregularities during the funding of the construction of monuments to historic figures, including Alexander the Great and Tsar Samuil, during the large Skopje 2014 project of urban renewal of the capital. The investigation was allegedly conducted at the same time with the numerous other criminal cases that targeted Gruevski and his top associates, during the work of the now thoroughly disgraced Special Prosecutor’s Office, but the public was not informed about this investigation. The total sum of the dozens of art pieces built over six years amounts to 57 million EUR – money that the Government gave to the Centar municipality.

One of the defendants, Elizabeta Kanceska Milevska, was already charged in a similar case, involving the construction of some of the large public buildings that were part of Skopje 2014. But after she decided to vote in favor of the imposed name change, the case against her was put on the back burner, and eventually she was declared not guilty. The now ruling SDSM party tried to use the Skopje 2014 monuments and buildings in PR campaigns in which it accused VMRO-DPMNE of spending money on boosting the national pride. Ethnic Macedonians generally approve of the project – VMRO was and remains more popular that SDSM and currently leads SDSM 2:1 in the polls, and the subsequent compromises that SDSM made on issues of national pride with neighboring countries have split the ruling party.

This new set of charges comes at a time when the Government is in a similar position – facing demands from Bulgaria that Macedonia must change its Constitution and include the Bulgarians as a constituent nation. The Government does not have the votes to do this, and is openly threatening a campaign of “persuasion” of VMRO-DPMNE representatives in Parliament. The campaign that was carried out in 2019 included arrests of members of Parliament or their family members, charges like the one against Kanceska Milevska, and bribery with public sector jobs and lucrative public contracts for relatives of those who voted to rename Macedonia.

Marija Miteva, spokeswoman of VMRO-DPMNE, said that the arrests are an attempt to exert pressure in the process of amending the Constitution, that she said will fail. Of the defendants, only Zoran Stavrevski remains active in VMRO, as coordinator of the activities of the party’s local officials.