While citizens wait to find out what they will pay for electricity this winter, the opposition SDSM today produced a figure from the other side of the same grid: 13.2 million euros. That is the value of the contract EVN Macedonia signed on 11 August this year to supply electricity meters.

The contract holder is the Serbian company "METER&CONTROL". It was founded in 2008, and its ownership history, SDSM claims, features Vojin Lazarević's "Rudnap Group".

This is where the link the party calls decisive comes in. Energy minister Sanja Božinovska, according to the opposition, was an executive director at "Rudnap Group" companies for Central and Eastern Europe between 2011 and 2014, and also managed "Rudnap DOOEL" Skopje.

How the opposition describes the network

Keti Šterjova and Maja Serafimovska-Borozan of SDSM laid this out at a press conference, calling it an energy "octopus" whose tentacles, in their account, reach from the Regulatory Commission, the REK power plants and the Development Bank all the way to offshore structures in Cyprus. They include Dušan Adamović, an SNS official and honorary consul, in the same network. Six months have passed since the claims were first made, they said, and the public prosecutor's office is silent.

And here is the part every reader should know before forming a view: the party's statement included no further evidence to substantiate the claims about business ties or the motives behind the appointment. The assertion linking "METER&CONTROL" and "Rudnap Group", and the minister's role in it, stands for now as an SDSM assertion.

That does not make the question unimportant. It means the answer is not to be found at a party press conference. A 13.2 million euro contract signed by a public distribution utility has public documentation, a tender procedure, and a competent institution that can establish facts rather than lean on press releases. If SDSM has more than indications, the place to take them is the prosecutor's office, not a microphone.

On the other side, the minister's response to these allegations has so far amounted to statements about protecting Macedonian ruby as part of the natural heritage. That is precisely what the opposition seized on for today's appearance. The question about the meters remains unanswered, and it is not a question that silence can close.