Shefshet Demirovski is an increasingly powerful player in the ammunition production market. In Serbia, he was linked to two espionage cases, and BIRN reveals that his fine in 2022 was paid by AleksandarMilojevikj, known by the nickname “AcaCvekjar”, who is currently on trial as a member of a group involved in cross-border cocaine smuggling.
The company in question is ATS Group, owned by the mysterious Macedonian businessman ShefshetDemirovski, BIRN reports, and this is not the first time Demirovski has been mentioned in an industrial espionage case in Serbia. Back in 2019, he was accused of bribing a former employee of the PrviPartizan ammunition factory in Uzhice in order to obtain confidential data on ammunition production technology.
Both cases illustrate the intensity of competition among ammunition manufacturers in the Balkans, where Serbia has one of the largest military industries. As global demand for ammunition from the Balkans has grown, so has the rivalry.
Little information is publicly available about Demirovski. The 50-year-old businessman – with support from the Macedonian state, business connections in Turkey and a former NATO general on the company’s advisory board – has in just a few years become one of the most ambitious manufacturers of small-caliber ammunition and military equipment in Macedonia.
Demirovski owns three factories in North Macedonia that operate under the ATS Group. He opened the first in Skopje in 2017 and produces helmets, body armor and other personal protective equipment for soldiers and police. In 2019, he founded ATS Engineering, a company that produces ammunition production machinery. The very next year, he bought a socialist-era ammunition factory in Samokov, a village in western North Macedonia, and turned it into ATS Ammunition.
