The 1,800-euro bribe that landed Stefan Bogoev, the former head of the Customs Administration, in detention was allegedly just the start. The ruling party claims it was only the first of several payments tied to a rigged tender worth 18 million denars for cleaning border crossings and terminals.

According to the accusations laid out by Brane Petruševski, Bogoev negotiated several financial installments with a person presented as a representative of the firm that won the tender, and one of the alleged payments exceeded 110,000 denars. The communication, it's claimed, ran through the Viber app. "The public deserves to know how much money Stefan Bogoev was supposed to get to rig this 18-million-denar tender," Petruševski said.

Here, as always with stories like this, it's wise to keep a cool head. These are accusations made by a political party against an official tied to the opposite side - and in the Balkans, corruption tends to get "uncovered" precisely when it becomes politically useful to uncover it. That doesn't mean the claims are false; it means we should wait for proof, not just a statement.

Still, if the accusations are accurate, the picture being painted is familiar to the point of boredom. A tender rigged through private messages, payments in installments, public money flowing into private pockets through a border-cleaning company. The question isn't whether these schemes exist - we all know they do. The question is whether this case ends in a verdict, or like so many others - with loud headlines today and a quiet fade-out in a few months, once attention shifts to the next scandal.