The Vodno cable car has been shut for four months. The summer has gone. The cost of the repair has meanwhile risen from 20 to 45 million denars. The repair contract has still not been signed.

Those are four sentences, each of them true, and together they describe how Skopje goes about fixing something that had been broken long before it broke.

The figure doubled before the work started

At its last session, the Skopje city council approved an increase in the subsidy to the public transport company for repairing the fault - 45 million denars, or around 730 thousand euros. The original provision was 20 million. The additional 25 million denars was secured through the 2026 budget revision and changes to the city's transport programme.

The City of Skopje explains that the additional funding is directed at reconstruction, improving the technical and functional condition, and raising the level of safety in operation.

Note the order. First the sum is secured, then a contractor is expected to be selected. The procedure for selecting an economic operator under the public procurement law is under way through the transport company, which runs the cable car, and the city says it is expected to be finalised in the coming period.

In other words: the budget was doubled before there is a bid that would justify the doubling.

What the Austrian firm found

The Austrian company Doppelmayr established that a full service of the cable car had never been carried out, and that there was a risk of a gondola detaching. That is the sentence the whole case turns on.

This is not a fault that happened in April. This is a fault that was discovered in April, after the system had run for years without a full service - carrying people above Skopje, in gondolas that were at times closed for wind and for routine technical servicing, which means some technician was looking at them regularly.

The City of Skopje admits as much itself: "This is a serious intervention, the result of years of neglect, and it requires a thorough and responsible approach."

And who exactly did the neglecting

"Years of neglect" is a phrase without a subject. No name, no post, no period. The cable car is a city asset run by the transport company, and the transport company answers to the City of Skopje - so the "neglect" has an exact address and an exact list of people who over those years did or did not sign a service contract.

Nobody has asked for that list. The question of how many years went by without a full service, and who was responsible for it in those years, has not once been put publicly.

Back at the end of April it was said that Doppelmayr would carry out the repair. To this day there is no contract. There is only a bigger figure and a procedure that is "expected to be finalised".