DUI is alleging a new scandal at MEPSO. A 236,000-euro tender for clearing the corridors under the power lines was awarded to a company set up just weeks before the tender was published. No work history. No references. With a clear party background.

The company is called „Green Maintenance". According to DUI, it is linked to activists of the VLEN coalition. One of the owners - Saban Sefki - publicly supports VLEN and Izet Medziti. The contract is signed by MEPSO's director, Burim Latifi - a close relative of Medziti. A family side-contract on a direct line.

If the accusations are accurate, it's a pattern we've seen too many times: a state-owned company, a firm set up on demand, a tender written for the winner, signatures from people with family ties. The money is public. The winner is partisan. The corruption is „technically within the rules".

VLEN responded: „DUI is lying, presenting the cheapest bid as corruption because their old channels for stealing money at MEPSO have been cut." Translated from political language into human: „The two parties accuse each other of the same thing because they both do the same thing." This is a standard recurring move in Macedonian politics - when DUI is out of power, it alleges corruption. When it was in power, it did the same.

More interesting is what DUI adds - a previous contract with a company from Banja Luka for the power line toward Albania, where the party claims there has been substantial financial damage. If both cases are connected by the same mechanism, that means MEPSO in recent years has been turning into a „cash machine" for party activists - regardless of who is in power.

DUI is calling for a reaction from the State Commission for the Prevention of Corruption, the Public Prosecutor's Office and the State Audit Office. Historically, when such accusations come from the opposition, these institutions react slowly or not at all. What they will do now - uncertain. But citizens are paying: 236,000 euros doesn't fall from the sky. It comes from the electricity bill everybody pays at the end of the month.

The question nobody is asking: when will there be the political will for an independent audit of every MEPSO tender from the last five years? Only then will we see how unique „Green Maintenance" really is, and how much of it is part of a system that doesn't depend on which party holds power.