The World Macedonian Congress calls on state prosecutors to investigate whether the December 2015 hand-over ceremony of the cache of wiretaps from the SDSM party to the Special Prosecutor’s Office was a sham.

The SDSM party was using the wiretaps for months to spark a colored revolution and once a unit of prosecutors who will go after the VMRO-DPMNE led Government was created, SDSM said that it gave the recordings to the Katica Janeva led team. The press was invited to witness the delivery of the boxes allegedly containing hard drives with thousands of recordings.

But, the World Macedonian Congress, which filed charges against the SPO prosecutors, points to the fact that there is no report on the delivery of the files. Yesterday former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski also raised the issue, saying that the boxes were empty and that the actual delivery took place several weeks later, after Zaev was assured that the cache is cleared of anything that could reflect badly on him.

SDSM officials came to the SPO office on December 30th 2015, and posed for the cameras as they were passing the boxes to each other, threatening VMRO-DPMNE officials with prison as they went. SDSM delayed this move for months, insisting that the SPO offices are not technically prepared to receive the tapes – which was likely an attempt to do last minute cleaning of the tapes which even the key leaker now acknowledges were “heavily modified”.

If the claims that the tapes were handed over on a later date are confirmed, possibly as pat of a process raised by the World Macedonian Congress, it would constitute a violation of the law that created Janeva’s team of prosecutors. Legal experts say that it could further contribute to have the tapes thrown out as evidence by the courts, on top of the revelations of tampering made by Verusevski.