To show the scope of the VMRO-DPMNE’s real estate holdings, Investigative Reporting Lab Macedonia has created an interactive map based on information supplied by the special prosecutor’s office.
The map shows the party’s 69 frozen properties across the country.
The most valuable is the White Palace, VMRO-DPMNE’s Skopje headquarters, where public real estate records show 3,816 square meters of business space on 1,240 square meters of land.
The other properties include houses, stores, apartments, lots with buildable land, lots with buildings under construction, gardens, and fields. All the properties on the map were purchased between 2009 and 2015, the period covered by the investigation, and were listed in documents from the special prosecutor’s office.
Unless the properties are linked directly to party functions, such ownership would have been illegal at the time the real estate was acquired.
According to cadastre land records, the ruling Social Democrats of Macedonia (SDSM) party owns nine properties of unknown value. In Skopje, SDSM owns only its 4,084-square-meter main office on Bihakica Street. The party also owns business space in Bitola (509 square meters), Bogdanci (68 square meters), Struga (347 square meters), and Valandovo (82 square meters). The party also owns land (which is now legal under the law passed on July 25) in Kavadarci (158 square meters), Kriva Palanka (174 square meters), Negotino (133 square meters), and Resen (482 square meters).
The Democratic Union for Integration, a smaller party, has office space in Chair, where its headquarters measure 274 square meters on 529 square meters of land; and 413 square meters of office space in Bit Pazar. In Debreshte, the Democratic Union for Integration owns a field of 3,032 square meters.
