Citizens paid 73 million euros for personal documents over five years. The Ministry of the Interior spent only 29 million. The 44-million-euro difference remains unexplained - because the contracts were declared "confidential." That's the gist of a new investigation by the Center for Civil Communications, and it's a story as old as the administration itself around here.

Passports are produced by the German firm Giesecke+Devrient, under a contract the interior ministry hides entirely - the terms, the amendments, the legal basis, not even how many documents are ordered each year are known. "Without knowing the quantities, you can't assess whether the price is reasonable or the contract economically justified," the researchers note. It's hard to argue with that logic.

The history is even more curious. The original tender dates from 2005 - 21 years old. Between 2018 and 2020 there were five failed attempts at a new tender, after which the ministry simply kept negotiating without public competition. Two decades without a published tender for something every citizen pays for - all of it packed into the magic word "confidential."

A Pool That Existed Only on Paper

The same pattern repeats with smaller projects too. A school pool in Čair, worth 890,000 euros, was declared 100 percent complete on November 21, 2025 - the same day the municipality received a supervision report saying the works were unfinished, with no electricity or water. The pool actually opened only six months later. Instead of a penalty for the delay, the deadline was extended twice at the contractor's request, who then applied for yet another pool at a different school.

None of this is coincidence, but a system. "Confidential" becomes a screen behind which millions vanish, and "complete on paper" is an official stamp on something that doesn't exist. The question isn't whether there's abuse - it's why institutions need a civic association to uncover what they themselves are supposed to be policing.