The Supreme Court has ruled: businessman Jordan Kamčev has no right to claim 1.5 million euros in damages in the „Reket" case. Five Supreme Court judges determined that Kamčev is not the injured party here, and so the civil claim for compensation is not allowed. Translation: the money isn't coming back. Kamčev is out.

Some context. The „Reket" case was one of Macedonia's biggest criminal trials of the last decade. In 2019, the then special prosecutor Katica Janeva was charged with extortion - allegedly going through middlemen to demand 1.5 million euros from Kamčev to „solve" his case. Kamčev paid. Later, alongside the other people involved, Janeva was sentenced to seven years in prison. Kamčev maintained that the money made him the victim - and demanded its return through a civil claim of 1.5 million.

The current Supreme Court ruling closes that legal door. The money stays put. Kamčev takes the loss. But the real question is somewhere else: where did the money actually end up? If Janeva extorted it and was convicted for that, then it's „proceeds of crime". It should land in the state treasury - not with whoever received it, not vanished into translations and accounts.

This is a Balkan-flavoured ruling - legally clean, emotionally unresolved. Kamčev wants his money. He can't have it. The money is „somewhere". The institutions whose job was to return it to a state account never moved with any urgency. And Macedonia, as an institution, keeps living with one of its expensive habits: cases close on paper, but on the ground the same hole remains - and another, and another.

For ordinary people, this ruling may not mean much directly. Indirectly, it does. When the Supreme Court hands down a decision that is legally sound but leaves the cash „in the fog," that's a signal that the legal system has no mechanism for actual restitution. It means that next time someone is shaken down with the help of a state official, the citizen who pays will not be able to recover the money. The extortionist is shielded. And that is a structural problem no Supreme Court ruling can fix.