Five days, one bidder and 340 million: Filipche demands full files

Five working days to submit offers, a single registered bidder and a programme that later almost entirely matched the pre-specified conditions: the procedure for the celebration worth about 340 million denars raises more questions than the Government has so far answered.

The president of SDSM, Venko Filipche, demanded that the minutes from the Government's 167th session, the composition of the commission that evaluated the offers, the selection criteria, the contracts and the individual payments be published. He claims that the public call by the State Lottery was used instead of a classical public procurement procedure and asked whether the Law on Sponsorships and Donations was applied to avoid a higher level of control.

An independently reconstructed chronology shows that on 28 April, at its 167th session, the Government entrusted the organisation of the celebration to the State Lottery. On 30 April the call was published with a deadline of five working days. It requested a world "A-class" artist with a production of the same rank and at least 30,000 attendees, a second international artist with Macedonian performers, and at least twelve theatre and visual events across the country.

Conditions and the programme coincided

The subsequent programme included David Guetta, Jose Carreras with Macedonian performers, and the series of events titled "A Brightly Lit Day." According to publicly released information, only the company "Stardast", associated with the production "Avalon", applied to the call, and five days after the deadline the programme was presented to the public.

The mere coincidence is not proof that the winner was preselected. But when the requirements are extremely specific, the deadline is short and there is only one offer, the Government must show that there was real competition and that the criteria were not written for an already known solution.

Further suspicion is raised by the fact that "Stardast" received 1,850,610 denars from the State Lottery in February 2026, two months before the call, for an activity that was not publicly explained. This does not prove illegality in the new procedure, but it heightens the need to publish the previous contract, the subject of that payment and any business links to the new engagement.

Government says the procedure was transparent

Government spokesperson Marija Miteva said the funds were not taken from the central budget but from undistributed profits of the State Lottery, and that the procedure was public and accountable. She stated that "Avalon" was the lead organiser and that "Stardast" was the legal entity through which the contract was executed. The Director of the Lottery, Aleksandar Klimovski, said the financing was carried out in accordance with the Law on Sponsorships and Donations.

Those explanations are the Government's position, but they are not a substitute for the contracts. For a sum of 340 million denars the public has the right to know who drafted the specification, who sat on the external commission, what evidence was requested from the sole bidder and how much each performer and subcontractor received.

The strongest answer to the suspicions is not an attack on the opposition, but the publication of the entire dossier. If the procedure was indeed clean, the documents will confirm it. If the Government continues to hide them, then the story of the celebration will remain a story of five days, one bidder and hundreds of millions of denars without a full public account.

Photo: frame from the SDSM press conference