March 6, 202308:20
On December 6, 2018, prosecutors in Armenia charged a Macedonian national called Branislav Dimitrijevic with “large-scale fraud” during construction of a north-south highway, as team leader for the French-Spanish consortium Safege-Eptisa.
Dimitrijevic was banned from leaving the country, but he did so anyway – with the help of three Macedonian diplomats, a private plane and, prosecutors say, someone else’s passport.
The prosecutors added his “illegal” departure to the charge sheet and Dimitrijevic, if ever found guilty in an Armenian court, faces spending years behind bars.
That, however, proved no barrier to Dimitrijevic resurfacing in February this year as one of the winners of a 22 million euro Macedonian government tender to supervise more road building, this time corridors 8 and 10D being built by the US-Turkish consortium Bechtel-ENKA.
With Prime Minister Dimitar Kovachevski watching on, the director of North Macedonia’s state roads enterprise, Ejup Rustemi, inked the deal with Paolo Orsini of the Italian engineering company IRD.
IRD is the lead partner in a consortium that also includes Evro Konsalting, co-owned by Dimitrijevic, Spanish Eptisa, which Dimitrijevic worked for in Armenia, and Elektra Solution, owned by Andon Ampov.
The Public Enterprise for State Roads, headed by Rustemi, said that the consortium won because its offer was of the “best quality and price”. Asked about Dimitrijevic’s legal issues in Armenia, the state agency told BIRN: “The entire selection procedure was conducted in accordance with all laws and bylaws regulating public procurement and was transparent from the outset.”
Dimitrijevic could not be reached for comment via Evro Konsalting.
Bypassing public tender
The tender for construction of the road corridors 8 and 10D was awarded to the US-Turkish consortium Bechtel-ENKA under a special law adopted by parliament in July 2021.
The company will build the motorway sections Tetovo-Gostivar, Struga-Kafasan and Prilep-Bitola.
Lawmakers passed a similar law in 2013 for the construction of the Miladinovci-Stip and Kicevo-Ohrid motorways.
The public tender for Corridors 8 and 10D is by no means the first won by Evro Konsalting.
Founded in 2002, the company was owned and managed by Dimitrijevic for years, until he made his son, Zoran, manager in 2021 and Elisaveta Ivanova joined as co-owner.
In that time, state and municipal authorities in North Macedonia signed more than 270 contracts with the firm worth a total of 4.5 million euros.
Last year alone, when Dimitrijevic was a fugitive from Armenian law, the company was awarded 11 contracts with state bodies worth 650,000 euros in total.
Evro Konsalting also supervised building work during a controversial makeover of the capital, Skopje, under the right-wing government of then Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, who fled to Hungary in 2018 – with the help of Hungarian diplomats – to evade a corruption conviction. The Skopje 2014 project has been dogged by allegations of corruption.
When the consortium involving Evro Konsalting won the latest tender in February, it was Dimitrijevic’s son, Zoran, who signed the contract on behalf of the company.
The Sargsyans
The construction of the north-south highway in Armenia also landed Levon Sargsyan, brother of former Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, in trouble with the law.
Prosecutors have accused him of using his post at the time in the country’s foreign ministry to influence the selection of the Armenian subcontractors in exchange for a cut of the profits.
Levon Sargsyan is currently on the run.
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Prosecutors in Armenia have told BIRN that Dimitrijevic is accused of creating an “organised group” with fellow Macedonian citizens Vladimir Sarafov, Mile Milenkoski, Stevo Simski, and Zoran Spirev, Bulgarian Filip Spirev and Volodymyr Stolyarchuk of Ukraine, with the purpose of skipping the country.
Sarafov and Milenkoski were diplomats at the time, while Simski was retired from the Macedonian diplomatic service. According to prosecutors, the group helped Dimitrijevic pass through passport control on October 1, 2019 via the VIP lounge of Yerevan international airport, using Zoran Spirev’s passport.
The story broke in August 2021, when Milenkoski, then working for the Macedonia mission to the OSCE, in Vienna, Austria, was arrested on an international warrant issued by Armenia as he tried to cross the border between Serbia and North Macedonia.
Milenkoski spent five months in extradition custody in the southern Serbian town of Vranje but was released when a court in the city of Nis ruled that the Armenian authorities had failed to submit any evidence to support the warrant.
Milenkoski declared justice done, “even when it’s unnecessarily slow”; he claimed he had been in Armenia on humanitarian work and had “never seen or communicated” with Dimitrijevic before, during or after his trip.
Sarafov retired from the diplomatic service and Milenkoski was suspended.
Elektra Solution, another company within the IRD-led consortium, also has an interesting backstory.
Andon Ampov, who signed the contract on behalf of Elektra Solution, is the son of Sotir Ampov, owner of the Road Institute of Veles, a small private company founded in 2021.
The Road Institute of Veles, partnering with Croatian IGH Institute, won the original tender for the highway supervision in 2022, but failed to provide a bank guarantee and the tender was cancelled.
At the time, Deputy Prime Minister Artan Grubi expressed his satisfaction that the tender procedure had been cancelled, claiming there was “Russian money” behind the winning bid.
The Alliance for Albanians, an opposition party, made a similar claim, citing reports that a company called Avenue Group, owned by Russian businessman Sergey Glyadelkin, is the principal shareholder in IGH. Glyadelkin is reported to be close to the Kremlin.
IGH and Ampov’s Road Institute of Veles were barred from bidding when the tender was repeated after receiving negative references from the public procurement system. Cue the son, Andon, and Elektra Solution.
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/03/06/fraud-charges-in-armenia-no-obstacle-to-state-contracts-in-north-macedonia/