A Jeep, a Porsche, a Volkswagen, an Audi, a BMW and a Passat - six vehicles and one flat. That is the list of assets police have temporarily seized from Aleksandar Lazarov of Kočani, the man who recently escaped through a window during questioning at a police station, then was caught in Skopje.

The Interior Ministry says that, alongside the criminal offence he is suspected of - linked to the unauthorised production and trafficking of drugs - evidence has been secured that Lazarov holds substantial movable and immovable property of dubious origin. The Basic Court in Kočani ordered temporary security measures and seized the vehicles and the flat.

The Kočani police department says the investigation is continuing, with the aim of establishing whether the assets were acquired lawfully. It sounds like a procedure like any other. But behind the cold language of the statement sits a question every resident of eastern Macedonia has probably already asked themselves: how did one man amass a fleet a worker on an average wage would not see even in a dream - and the system only noticed after he fled his own police station?

Seizing assets built on crime is exactly what the state is supposed to do. The problem is not that it is reacting now, but that six luxury cars and a flat could pile up undisturbed until all of it ended up on the front pages. The seized property is easy to count. It is harder to answer how long it stayed visible to everyone, and invisible to the ones who were supposed to ask.

It remains to be seen whether the temporary measures will grow into a permanent seizure, or whether it will all melt away at some later stage of the proceedings, as tends to happen. Kočani is waiting for an answer.