The mechanism is so simple it barely needs explaining. A police officer at the tow-truck impound lot of the public company Gradski Parking writes a fine for a vehicle towed for illegal parking. Instead of taking payment through the card terminal, he takes it in cash. The money stays with him. On the paperwork he glues receipts from earlier transactions so everything looks in order.

This is not improvisation. This is a system, run from April to July this year, repeatedly, under the same circumstances.

A prosecutor from the Specialised Department for Prosecuting Crimes Committed by Police Officers is running a case against a junior officer from the Road Traffic Safety Department of the Skopje police. The charge is abuse of official position and authority, article 353 of the Criminal Code. He has been remanded in custody for eight days.

The numbers that show the scale

He unlawfully pocketed around 12,700 denars. He cost the state budget at least 85,500 denars. The gap between those two figures is more interesting than either on its own - it means most of the damage never landed in his pocket at all, it simply never entered the till.

How? According to the case file, in some instances he classified the offence as lighter than it was and issued a smaller fine. In others he issued no fine and collected nothing, yet the vehicle was released from the lot the same day.

Which means some driver walked away with their car that day without paying anything. That driver is not anonymous - their vehicle was in an impound lot, with a registered number. The question the press releases do not touch is whether those people will be checked too, or whether the whole case will end with one junior officer.

Four months

April to July. Four months in which one man, at one workstation, in one impound lot, ran a pattern that evidently caught nobody's eye. This was not a sophisticated scheme - it was fiscal receipts glued onto the wrong records.

The Interior Ministry's internal control department uncovered it and filed the criminal complaint. That is good and it should be said plainly. But uncovering it after four months means the control mechanism works retroactively, not preventively - once the damage is done and the figure is already known.

Disciplinary proceedings have also been launched and the officer will be suspended until they conclude. The open question remains: how many impound lots are there, how many similar posts, and who is checking them while it is still not too late.