For nineteen months nobody knew where he was. Then, on Wednesday at 5:35 in the morning, Perparim Bajrami turned up on his own at the Dolno Blace border crossing and requested entry into Macedonia. Detained on the spot, taken to "Shutka" prison. The international warrant for his arrest had been issued back in December 2024.

The script is almost identical to February, when Artan Grubi came back through the same crossing at 6:10 in the morning. The difference between the two surrenders is half an hour on the clock and seven months on the calendar. Same border crossing, same early hour, same terse Interior Ministry statement with not a word about where a wanted man had spent nearly two years.

What the indictment says

Bajrami is the first defendant in the State Lottery abuse case, in which Grubi is the second. In August the prosecution filed charges against eight people - among them former government secretary general Metodija Dimevski and five former members of the Supervisory Board. All are charged as co-perpetrators of abuse of official position and authority under Article 353 of the Criminal Code.

The core of the case is the procurement of video lottery terminals - the poker machines. According to the prosecution, in 2023 and 2024 the defendants exceeded their authority and inflicted damage on the state-owned company. The initial figure was 507,632,173 denars, roughly 8.2 million euros. After expert examination the sum rose to 596,125,511 denars, or about 9.7 million euros. A million and a half euros in difference that surfaced only once the experts read the documents.

A career that moved much faster than average

Bajrami was born in 1993 in Kumanovo and lives in Vaksince, municipality of Lipkovo. He is 33 today. He got his first permanent job in 2018, at 24 - political adviser in parliament, at a time when his sister Vjolca Bajrami worked there too, as chief of staff to the then-speaker Talat Xhaferi. Four years later, at 29, he was director general of the State Lottery.

That fact alone proves nothing illegal. But it says something about how careers move when the party network is wide enough. In his own CV Bajrami stated that he had been a political adviser at the Ministry for Political System during the period when Grubi ran it; Grubi denies it.

The question left unanswered

The trial, scheduled for 11 and 16 September, has been postponed. The court served Bajrami with the indictment, and the legal deadline for reviewing it is eight days, so proceedings resume on 18 September at 12:00. The prosecution says four more cases against him for the same offence are running at the Skopje public prosecutor's office, with evidence still being gathered.

Meanwhile, seven months after Grubi's return, the public still does not know what piece of intelligence was so serious that the prosecution decided he could not be held in custody. Prosecutor Daniel Kocev said the security services had spent two years collecting information about threats to Grubi and that the information is classified. If that assessment had existed for two years, why did the public learn about it on precisely the day he came back into the country?

Grubi is now under house arrest and is expected to be released from that within a month. Bajrami is in Shutka and his defence will ask for a lighter measure. The prosecution has announced 231 pieces of material evidence and seven witnesses. Eight defendants, nearly ten million euros in damage - and two men who were out of reach for two years, then walked into the country through the same crossing, at the same early hour, as if working to an agreed timetable.