Goran Georgievski, the unwed husband of Labour and welfare minister Mila Carovska, has confirmed that he has received a number of public procurement contracts which she has not listed in her revenue report as requested by the anti-corruption laws.

Geogrievski claims that he has received the contracts in legal, competitive procedures, while Carovska said that he owns little property and that in the future she will list it in her reports. He owns a company which provides drone flying services and was frequently hired by the Government or by municipal authorities led by the SDSM party across Macedonia in what media outlets say are allegedly no bid contracts. The largest of them is an attempt to arrange a contract with the city of Skopje to purchase a drone to map out air pollution for a significant sum of 100.000 EUR which was cancelled due to public outcry.

Carovska, a former left wing NGO activist who has pushed for redefining marriage insists that she has not violated the letter of the law when she didn’t report the income of her, as she said, “informal husband”, with whom she has a child. The law is in place to monitor whether government officials are diverting public procurement toward their own pockets or toward close family members and the opposition VMRO-DPMNE party insists that she violated not only the spirit, but also the letter of the law.

Carovska’s unwed husband won multiple, million high tenders from public institutions run by SDSM. According to the media reports, he has received 1.5 million denars for drone procurement. We ask Carovska if these public contracts are the reason why she is not reporting the income of her unwed husband and if this is a violation of the laws banning no bid contracts? According to Article 81 of the law on property the property of unwed partners obtained for the duration of their union is considered their shared property, meaning that Carovska violated the law, said Maja Slaveva from VMRO-DPMNE.