The Court Said No, the Inspector Ordered Demolition, and the Municipality Legalised the Building: New Criminal Complaint Against Kostadin Kostadinov

Strumica police have filed a criminal complaint with the Strumica Basic Public Prosecutor's Office against K.K. (36), former mayor of Strumica, S.R. (38), then head of the Department of Urban Planning, Utilities and Construction Land, and J.P. (60) from Bitola, former manager of a Bitola company that has since been liquidated. Judging by the period and the initials, this is Kostadin Kostadinov of SDSM, mayor of Strumica from October 2021 to October 2025.

The first two are suspected of abuse of official position and authority, and the Bitola manager of forging a document. The case dates from 2022 and concerns the legalisation of an illegally built structure in the village of Kuklish.

The timeline is what makes the complaint hard to ignore. In 2016 the Higher Administrative Court rejected the owner T.J.'s appeal for legalisation, on the grounds that the structure stood on a plot where the Municipality of Strumica held ownership rights over a building. In 2019 the Higher Administrative Court confirmed that the structure had been built without a building permit. A municipal building inspector then ordered him to remove it.

Instead of demolition, according to the Interior Ministry, came a survey report. The department head asked the Bitola manager to prepare a report for deleting buildings from the cadastral plot, and in the report and the technical statement he falsely stated that there were no buildings on the site. With those documents, the Municipality of Strumica's buildings were deleted from the records, the plot got a clean title deed, and T.J. received a legalisation decision for a warehouse with an internal area of 161 square metres. He could then buy the land under the building and also become the owner of 866.46 square metres of state land.

Kostadinov responded on Facebook. "Public office carries responsibility and I am ready to answer for every decision I made, because I know I made them in line with the law and after the required procedures had been carried out," he wrote. He claims he has long been the target of posts that create the impression of guilt decided in advance, and asks for the presumption of innocence to be respected. "I'm not asking to be trusted on my word. I'm asking for space for the facts to be heard and the evidence to be assessed impartially," he said.

That's a legitimate request, and the court is where the answer will come from. This isn't the first complaint against him: earlier there were complaints linked to illegal construction, the purchase of electric buses and disputed tax exemptions. But the story has another side too. If the allegations are true, the system had two court rulings and an order to remove the structure, and yet one survey report was enough to make all of it vanish from the cadastre. How many "clean title deeds" like this are there across the country?