MINISTER

Vele Samak, a Minister for attracting foreign investments, is the most senior Government official driving and executing on a broad range of policies to secure business and investment opportunities in Macedonia for some of the largest companies in the world. Through a combination of direct campaigns and broad-based events, Minister Samak has developed relationships with hundreds of C-level and senior business decision makers throughout Europe and the US across many industries resulting not only in investments but also in supplier opportunities. For example, Volkswagen Group was the main OEM at the First Macedonian Automotive Supplier Conference held in 2008 in Skopje, Macedonia. In this role, Samak has successfully attracted some of the largest Greenfield investments to Macedonia, including Johnson Matthey from UK and Montupet from France, in addition to securing a variety of projects in the dairy, food processing, call center and electronics industry.

Previously, Vele Samak was a product manager at Microsoft overseeing enterprise marketing of SQL Server 2005 and Business Intelligence solutions for the US market. He helped drive partner and competitive marketing campaigns which contributed to over $1 billion in revenue and won two Marketing Impact awards. In 2004 while at The Wharton School, he and a group of students started TerraPass, a unique company that arose out of a class by Professor Karl Ulrich. TerraPass uses market mechanisms to help customers offset the CO2 emissions of their vehicles. As Public Relations officer, Vele represented the company to all media in the US generating 16 stories in a short span. Today, TerraPass is one of most successful firms in its sector.

Before Wharton, Vele Samak was a Vice President in Global Quantitative Research – a highly ranked world-wide research team at Citigroup – where he developed quantitative products to help investors implement investment strategies. His work on macroeconomic risk analysis is widely used by global investors and his research on optimal allocation of pension funds is published and widely quoted from the Financial Analysts Journal.

Vele Samak, holds a Bachelor’s degree from The University of Chicago (1996) and a Masters in Business Administration from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (2005). A former Secretary at the Macedonian-American Friendship Association (MAFA), Vele Samak speaks English and is proficient in Serbian, Croatian and German. He is married with one daughter.