The celebration of 35 years of independence cost around 5.5 million euros - 340 million denars. Government spokesperson Marija Miteva announced the figure at a press conference, with documentation, explaining that the bulk of it, 300 million denars, came from the State Lottery's undistributed 2024 profit rather than from the budget. Another 650,000 euros came from socially responsible companies.

Formally, then, citizens paid nothing from the treasury. But there is a detail in the procedure that opens the very question the government tried to close with that same press conference.

A five-day call, a single bid

On 28 April, at its 167th session, the government set out the activities and instructed the State Lottery to provide 300 million denars and publish a public call. The call went out on 4 May - and ran for five days. Exactly one company applied: "Stardust", linked to "Avalon", and it won a sponsorship contract worth 4.8 million euros.

Lottery director Aleksandar Klimovski was asked whether the company could have refused the government. The answer was no.

"A joint stock company has 3 bodies. There is a shareholder who is your boss, and you have a supervisory and a management board. We cannot refuse orders from the shareholder if they are lawful and appropriate," he explained.

On the committee, and on the programme

The bid was assessed by a three-member committee of outside experts. The chairman was composer Nikolče Micevski, with members Zoran Stefanovski and Veselin Teoharov. According to the director, the committee confirmed that the bid and the proposed programme matched the government's requirements.

That same Nikolče Micevski later appears as the author of the orchestrations and arrangements for the José Carreras concert - part of that very programme.

Asked about it, Micevski gave a narrower definition of his role than the director had.

"The committee was only there to check the authenticity of the documents, that is, whether they were submitted in full and on time. The envelope was opened in front of us. But the offer for me to be engaged in the programme came later. At the moment when I was chairman of the committee, I had no idea I would be part of the programme. That came later, someone likes my work and made me an offer," Micevski said.

The two explanations are not the same. The director says the committee also confirmed the programme; the committee's chairman says they only checked whether documents were complete and on time. That is not a nuance - that is the difference between a technical check and an assessment of substance.

What remains unknown

So far nothing has been published about when exactly Micevski was hired, who chose him, what fee he received, or whether the engagement was declared to the institutions. Nor is there any official finding from a competent body on whether a conflict of interest existed at all.

The individual sums for José Carreras, David Guetta and the domestic performers are not known either - those contracts carry confidentiality clauses. So we know the total, we do not know what for.

"Avalon produkcija" representative Boban Milošoski also revealed that "Stardust", a company owned by his daughter, received 1.8 million denars in sponsorship from the Lottery for commercial concerts two months before the call was published - concerts which, as he put it, he currently cannot recall.

Transparency with limited opening hours

At the press conference Miteva invoked the past: former Lottery director Perparim Bajrami and former first deputy prime minister Artan Grubi are charged in the "Lottery" case over a sum the prosecution revised to 9.7 million euros. The comparison is clear enough - they took, we gave.

Except that comparing yourself to something worse is not the same argument as proving the procedure was clean. A five-day call with one bid, a committee whose chairman later works on the programme he approved, and confidentiality clauses over every individual amount - those are three things a transparent procedure has no need to defend.

The State Lottery is not a private cash box. Its profit is public money, whether or not it passed through a treasury account. The question, then, is not whether the celebration was beautiful. The question is why a procedure for five million euros looked as though it had been cut to fit a single bidder.