Behind the East Gate shopping centre in Gazi Baba, a draft Detailed Urban Plan CS 09 is being drawn up, allocating four building plots to structures with a B5 designation - hotel complexes. The total floor area is close to 141,000 square metres. If an average hotel room is around 40 square metres, that means between 3,000 and 3,500 hotel rooms are being drawn on that stretch.

SDSM councillor in Gazi Baba, Aleksandar Veljanovski, put the numbers on the table and asked whether an urban planning fraud worth 23.5 million euros is being prepared.

The arithmetic is simple, and that is exactly what makes it uncomfortable

The standard charge for developing construction land in this part of Skopje is around 180 euros per square metre. If flats were built on that area, roughly 25 million euros should flow into the budget. But with a B5 stamp - hotel - the investor legally pays only five percent of that sum, which is a little over 1.2 million euros.

The difference is 23.5 million euros. Money that on one reading ends up in the budgets of the Municipality of Gazi Baba and the City of Skopje, and on another - ends up nowhere.

The question Veljanovski is asking is not whether a hotel may be built. The question is what happens to those buildings afterwards. Will they be sold as residential apartments, once the fee has been paid at the hotel rate? And alongside the millions saved, does the investor get a second favour - fewer parking spaces, given that hotel standards require less parking than residential buildings?

The neighbouring plot already showed the scenario

This is not a hypothesis. On the adjacent building plot there is already a completed structure where people have moved in and live in flats, but cannot register them as their place of residence with the Interior Ministry. That is how the story ends when a building is one thing on paper and another in reality - the buyer is left holding the keys and no address.

According to cadastre records, the land behind East Gate is largely owned by the property management company Skopje East Gate Seg.

What the mayor says

Boban Stefkovski admits in an interview that the municipality is seeing intensified urbanisation - something previously more pronounced in Centar, Karposh or Kisela Voda, while now Avtokomanda, Chento and Hipodrom are becoming attractive to investors. He maintains that the procedures for adopting detailed urban plans are clear, that public hearings are held for every amendment, and that plans are changed according to citizens' objections.

"The time in this municipality when detailed urban plans were adopted secretly and by force is over," he says, recalling that the illegal building in Indzikovo was demolished in September 2023 and that a kindergarten is now going up on that site.

None of those claims answers the specific number. A public hearing is a procedure; 141,000 square metres designated as hotel is a fact written into the draft plan. Both things can be true at once - a plan adopted by every rule can still produce 3,500 "hotel rooms" in which people without an address will one day be living.

The answer is simple and fits in one sentence: exactly what will be built on those four plots. Until that sentence exists, the figure 23,500,000 stands unrefuted.