Skopje, 31 October 2024 (MIA) - Minister of Energy, Mining and Minerals Sanja Bozhinovska claims she owns Macedonian and Czech citizenships and has no valid Bulgarian passport and ID.

Minister Bozhinovska says in a press release that she applied for release from the Bulgarian citizenship on 14 September 2023.

"Regretfully, certain actors from Bulgaria that have no interest in building goodneighborly relations between Macedonia and Bulgaria and overcoming the obstacles for our EU membership are abusing the situation. The citizenship that I owned in the past was taken out of economic reasons, as many other Macedonian citizens have done, not as some want to present that it was done out of national reasons," reads the press release.

Bulgarian news agency BGNES has published an application for Bulgarian citizenship dating from 2004, which Bozhinovska signed, claiming she has Bulgarian roots.

The topic was also discussed at Thursday's Q&A session in Parliament, during which Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski said Bozhinovska was more a Macedonian than everyone else.

"It is a privilege to have Sanja Bozhinovska as minister in the Macedonian government. Her results in the energy sector is something you (the opposition) can dream of. We are talking about things that the public is not interested in. She is well-known by the business elite across Europe. We invent stories that have nothing in common with energy or minerals. Bozhinovska is more a Macedonian than all of you," PM Mickoski said in the answer to the question asked by SDSM MP Oliver Spasovski.

MIA file photo