26
February 2020
INVESTIGATION
How Hungarian Olive Oil Kept Macedonian Media Afloat Hungarian ads have helped the survival of media supporting fugitive former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski. GOCE TRPKOVSKI | BIRN | SKOPJE
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oglarka Street in Budaors, a suburb of the Hungarian capital, 12 kilometres from Budapest, doesn’t look special on Google Street View. It resembles streets in many other suburbs in Hungary and Europe – family homes with yards, lawns, trees, cars parked in front of garages. A small wooden house stands at the dead end. It is the registration address of Olivery, a Hungarian company selling olive oil that is made in Croatia, but which was advertised only in certain media outlets in North Macedonia. Until recently, Olivery adverts dominated the websites of Kurir, Denesen, Republika, Lider and others. But it disappeared at the beginning of this year and can now be seen only on Alfa TV. Other small Hungarian companies placed adverts in these same media outlets, and some still do, like Bonyart, an online shopping agency, marketing home decorations such as fridge magnets and door plates. Another is Skin Delight, a cosmetics company. Hungarian ads filled the gap after change of power: A quick look on the media outlets where these adverts were placed reveals that they were not chosen at random. All of them belong to the group of so-called Hungarian media in North Macedonia, controlled by three companies. They earned this nickname after Hungarian capital was injected in them by people seen as members of Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban’s propaganda structures. Some of these media used to be owned by obscure companies based in the Central American offshore haven of Belize. The editorial policies of all of them
were, and still are, strongly supportive of the former ruling VMRO-DPMNE party in North Macedonia – and hostile not only towards its main rival, the Social Democrats, SDSM, but towards everybody else that the former ruling party saw as an opponent. Under the VMRO-DPMNE government, which was ousted in mid-2017, these media outlets used to run adverts of government campaigns and of larger domestic companies. One of the companies behind the websites, Em Media, received 25,000 euros in two months in 2015 directly from the then government, open source treasury data shows. The same data reveals that a number of state institutions, such as the ministries of Economy, Education, Transport and Communications, Environment, as well as the state agencies for employment and land registry – all placed adverts on Em Media’s websites for between 250 and 500 euros a time. Another media company, Prva Republika, received 32,000 euros in 2015 from the North Macedonia’s government filed under “other contractual services” without further specification. It published a lot of adverts from other institutions as well, and charged them for that. After the VMRO DPMNE-led government under Nikola Gruevski lost power, problems emerged in these media. In 2017, there were delays in paying salaries. Some of the outlets had to close down, such as Republika print magazine, Radio Free Macedonia and TV Nova. Others were reorganised and introduced new programs. But for these, when the state adverts from North Macedonia ceased, new ones from Hungary filled the gap. In mid 2017, long before Gruevski
Oil advertisement. Photo: Prizma.mk
fled from Skopje to Budapest to avoid serving a prison sentence, a couple of Hungarians, Peter Schatz and Agnes Adamik, both former directors in the Hungarian state broadcaster, moved in the opposite direction, making a grand entrance in the North Macedonia media market. Players operating through multiple companies: Olivery olive oil was one of the main sponsors of the media supporting the former ruling party in the period after the government in North Macedonia changed. It supported newsrooms of three or more journalists, commentators, cameramen and other staff, according the impressum sections on their websites. Searching through past online content with specialized tools reveals that the olive oil adverts started to appear in 2017, which is when Hungarian capital entered them. The key players for distributing this capital were Adamik and Schatz. The websites supported by Hungarian capital are attached to three companies, Em Media, Prva Republika and LD Press Media. Em Media owns the domains of Kurir, Deneshen, Vistina, Ekonomski and Zdravstvo. Prva Republika registered the Republika website and Pressing TV, an online television station.
Lider used to be a website in the Em Media group, but was later acquired by its editor-in-chief LjupchoZlatev. Today it’s part of Prva Republika. LD Press Media is the publisher of the Netpress news agency, formerly owned by the Finzicompany. This company and its late owner, Kosta Krpach, who was found dead with a gunshot wound in his apartment in Skopje in 2016, aged 40, were involved in acquiring Israeli wiretapping equipment for the secret police. The Special Prosecution Office, SJO, in North Macedonia, has investigated this case, dubbed Trezor, which is now in court. All three companies have the same majority owner, the Adinamik Media Company, founded on September 26, 2017, fully owned by Adamik. Schatz is the majority owner of Alfa TV through four companies. Alfaskop is the name of the company directly owning Alfa. It is owned by four companies, of which CHS Invest Group holds the majority share. The majority owner of CHS is Target Media, which Schatz owns. It was registered on April 11, 2017. BIRN sent questions to the management of every company running the “Hungarian” media concerning the adverts from Hungarian companies. We asked whether they had approached the companies, or were approached by them, what kind of advertising packages were agreed, and
