English
Plusinfo reports that the investigation into the Kocani nightclub disaster found a number of messages that mention top officials of the SDSM led Government, as the owner of the Pulse nightclub was using his proximity to SDSM to ensure that the place remains open.
According to Plusinfo editor Branko Geroski, the messages were found on the mobile devices of Dejan and Mihail Jovanov, the owner of the club and his son, and included a woman they were working with. In one of the messages, Mihail informs Bojana that Interior Minister Oliver Spasovski intervened in the Stip police to stop looking into the nightclub. Another message reveals that they were using this connection to scare off the Kocani police commissioner.
In another group of messages, Mihail Jovanov is talking to local tax inspector Dragan Paunov, after a regional tax authority director wanted to shut down the club. Paunov informs Jovanov that the inspector is closely related to then Deputy Prime Minister Bojan Maricic, and advises Jovanov to use his SDSM party connections to get to Maricic. Jovanov tells the inspector that he was already able to reach Minister Blagoj Bocvarski and the head of the UJP tax authority and SDSM party deputy leader Sanja Lukarevska, but did not get to Maricic, or his wife who is also a high SDSM official.
The messages show that the owners of the club were using political clout to keep operating, even though the premises were extremely unsafe. At the same time, Plusinfo raises the question why were these messages not used in the prosecution of the disaster, and were not even leaked in previous significant investigative articles that were written about the disaster.
