Bulletin, Volume 1

Corruption is widespread everywhere in the world, especially in the Balkans region. The citizens of Monte Negro believe that it is present in the health care the most, in Serbia, as of this year, the Agency for Fighting against Corruption started working, while the newly elected president of Croatia won as an anticorruption candidate. The esteemed British newspaper Financial Times calls upon the EU to support the fight against corruption in the Balkan countries. Spain can’t seem to put an end to the corruption scandals in the construction business on a local level, while in China it is esteemed that in the past 30 years the state officials put 50 billion dollars in their pockets. This news is on the front pages of this newsletter.

In addition, the anticorruption expert, Vanja Mihajlova, analyzes and compares the role and independence of the anticorruption bodies in the countries from the region and offers recommendations for enhancing the efficiency of this body in our country.

This is followed by a brief outline of the results from the recent research, which has shown that the media in the country do not play their socially important role in the fight against corruption, as well as recommendations for measures that need to be taken for the sake of more professional, independent, and objective reporting about this serious problem. The public procurements are also in the focus of this issue. The annual investigation of the public procurements process in our country shows that there is still a serious room for abuse and inefficient spending of the public money.

The expert on public procurements, Darko Janevski, analyzes the advantages and weaknesses of the application of the electronic procurements from the perspective of their role in decreasing corruption.

Misoslav Trajanovski, a legal expert on public procurements, recommends an implementation of supervision and control of the public procurements in our country.
We hope that the offered topics will trigger your interest and contribute to each and every one of us, in his/her line of work, to help in the direction of a greater and more consistent application of the principles and policies of “good governance”.

The first MAK issue can be found here