For four years, a company in Skopje did not file its annual accounts. Not for 2022, not for 2023, not for 2024, not for 2025. Four consecutive years in which nobody in the system raised a question - and now the Financial Police Directorate is filing a criminal complaint for tax evasion, with damage to the budget of over 12.6 million denars.

Two individuals and one legal entity have been reported, and the case has been sent to the Basic Public Prosecutor's Office in Skopje. The offence is classified under Article 279 of the Criminal Code.

From a Turkish owner to a new owner, the same company

According to the financial police, the first suspect is a Turkish national who was the de facto owner and manager of the company between 2016 and 2021. Ownership and management were then transferred to the second person named in the complaint. The company kept operating. The annual accounts did not.

The damage calculation is methodical. Goods worth 32,054,759 denars are treated as unjustifiably appropriated. Value-added tax of 5,769,856 denars and personal income tax of 3,561,283 denars were never calculated, declared or paid. Expired short-term liabilities to suppliers amounting to 32,847,325 denars were not written off, which pulled in another 3,284,732 denars of unpaid profit tax.

Total: 12,615,871 denars that never reached the budget. In euros - roughly 205 thousand.

The question isn't who evaded, it's who wasn't looking

Tax evasion is a criminal offence, and that much is clear. But there is a second layer to this story that is not in the complaint. A company that fails to file annual accounts four years running is a company that is visible as a problem, four years running, in every register that tracks it. This is not a hidden scheme with offshore structures and shell companies across three jurisdictions. This is the absence of a document every business entity has to hand in every single year.

So the mechanism that was supposed to go off did not go off four times. Or it did, and nobody was listening.

According to the complaint, the books also recorded invoices used to reduce the base for calculating profit tax. Goods worth over half a million euros vanished from the records.

The case now sits with the prosecution. And the question left hanging over the tax system is simpler than any article of the Criminal Code: how many companies like this one are quietly stacking up unreported years right now, waiting for someone to notice?