The Predator spyware marketed to the world by an Israeli software company and used in Greece and Egypt to spy on journalists, dissidents and others, was developed in North Macedonia – a violation of the Balkan country’s law. But local efforts to investigate why the software was built in Skopje appear stalled. The European Parliament also is probing the matter. Reporting: Saska Cvetkoska, Ivana Nasteska, Bojan Stojanovski, Tasos Telloglou, Eliza…
by Aubrey Belford, Sarunas Cerniauskas, Matteo Civillini and Ola Westerberg As COVID-19 swept through Europe in March, the director of Lithuania’s Central Prison Hospital was relieved to receive 3,000 FFP2 respirator masks, the gold standard for filtering out tiny airborne particles, like the coronavirus that causes the disease. The masks arrived in boxes plastered with the CE mark, the immediately recognizable symbol showing that products have been verified as meeting European standards.…
by Aubrey Belford, Saska Cvetkovska, Biljana Sekulovska and Stevan Dojčinović Russian spies and diplomats have been involved in a nearly decade-long effort to spread propaganda and provoke discord in Macedonia as part of a region-wide endeavor to stop Balkan countries from joining NATO. This conclusion comes from a tranche of intelligence documents obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and partners NOVA TV and the Crime and Corruption Reporting Network (KRIK). The…
A joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and partners has uncovered new information that rewrites the story of the fake news boom in the Macedonian town of Veles. A week before Election Day in 2016, BuzzFeed News revealed that young men and teens in Veles were running over a hundred websites that pumped out often false viral stories that supported Donald Trump. Media outlets from…
