The New Year's decoration of Skopje has begun. A tall Christmas tree is placed in the square, on a red platform above the floor fountain, which has not been functioning for years. The choice of the location of the Christmas tree is better than last year, if nothing else at least the space above the fountain will be used and its further damage will be prevented during the holidays. The Christmas tree also looks more beautiful than last year, which was the subject of a joke among Skopje residents last year.

What else will light up in the square and on the streets of Skopje is not yet known. Today we could see wires being strung across the Warrior on Horse Fountain. Whether it will also be decorated, remains one of the "surprises", which the mayor Danela Arsovska is preparing for the citizens, and until now she is keeping them as a big secret.

Again this year, Arsovska does not share any information about the New Year decoration of the city. There is no answer to the questions of "Sloboden Pechat" which company is decorating, when the contract was concluded and how much the decoration will cost, considering the fact that no such tender has been announced on the site of the Electronic System for Public Procurement. The City of Skopje does not share whether it is a donation and whether it has been accepted by the Council of the City of Skopje, they do not even answer which parts of the city and which streets and boulevards will be decorated.

Arsovska, in her own "style", will probably in the end just share photos on Facebook of how the city is decorated, and the people of Skopje will again be left without an answer as to how the decoration of Skopje was made possible and how much money was drained from the budget.

Last year, the mayor announced that the city would be decorated for 30 thousand euros, but it was never found out which company received the money for decorating.

On the eve of the New Year, Skopjes still live in gray, it is decorated only in the Center

Arsovska claimed that the whole procedure was legal, that a public call was published, but the attempt to find that public call proved unsuccessful, just like this year, because it is not displayed on the website of the City of Skopje, nor can it be found on Bureau of Public Procurement. At the same time, she never indicated exactly when and where it was published. The whole problem is, in fact, that Arsovska does not want to be transparent to the citizens and to announce the details of the amount spent on decoration. He did not do that either last year or the year before, when he claimed that the decoration was done without spending a penny from the city treasury.

The decoration of the city square, the main thoroughfares and the New Year bazaar are financed through a public call, which was published in accordance with the acts and regulations like all public calls. This has been said several times so far, explained in detail and transparently presented to the public. Hence, any other "news" is an attempt at manipulation, sensationalism and speculation. However, the difference between this year's organization of the city decoration and the previous years is that now we have 10 times less expenses than what was spent in the past two decades - the difference is also that this year the money for this purpose was not received by the same company that received so far - Arsovska announced last year, although such an explanation of hers for the entire procedure regarding the decoration has not been publicly recorded anywhere.

After the reaction in the public, the Financial Police got involved in the case, which started an investigation into the costs of the decoration. Earlier, the Basic Public Prosecutor's Office pointed out that if the Financial Police Administration, which is responsible for monitoring how the public's money is spent, does not file a case, then they will do so.

And a year later, the public did not receive any information that the investigation established, and the mystery surrounding how the City decorates Skopje continues this year as well.