Former Prime Minister and VMRO leader Nikola Gruevski published his first comments on the major corruption scandal that has brought down the Special Prosecutors’ Office and has implicated top officials of the SDSM party and the Zaev Government in high level corruption. Gruevski, who now lives in Budapest where he escaped politically driven prosecution on the part of the SPO, points to a number of big picture issues which, he says, are easy to miss in the daily flood of interrogations, and recriminations.

Gruevski says that the Zaev regime has introduced a campaign of persecution of political opponents not seen since the early days of Communism in the 1940ies, as hundreds of VMRO officials and activists are prosecuted and detained. Gruevski notes that, on top of the political asylum he received in Hungary, the Greek Supreme Court refused to extradite two of Janeva’s defendants, and more recently, a Swedish court refused to extradite a man which Zaev’s prosecutors charged with “terrorism”.

Obscured by the mega corruption scandal, there are several major issues which can cause major damage to the citizens and the Macedonian people in general. The institutions of three EU member states, Greece, Hungary and Sweden, have reached decisions that clearly indicate that instead of criminal prosecution we have on-going political persecution, based on made up crimes, and dozens of people are already arrested based on unfair trials, Gruevski writes, warning that this could contribute to Macedonia being denied the date to open EU accession talks. “It’s fortunate that the European Commission is of the opinion that accession talks should begin regardless of all our deficiencies, but some countries have a negative position on the request, and they are now being given strong arguments their position. Any of them could say ‘is this a country you would want to see open EU accession talks, when its Prime Minister is openly pressuring his coalition partners as he attempts to remove the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?’. Losing the date to open accession talks could mean lengthy new delays, even after the Prime Minister changed the name of the country, the history of the nation and the identity of the Macedonian people, arresting members of Parliament and fabricating criminal cases against them to get them to vote in favor of his name proposal”.

Gruevski points out to a statement from former Justice Minister Blerim Bexheti, who is a high official of the DUI party, who confirmed that Zaev pressured him to influence the DUI appointed members of the Judicial Council in order to replace the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Another matter Gruevski raises is the way in which businessman Jordan Orce Kamcev collected the materials necessary to disclose the extortion attempts made by Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva against him. Shortly before Janeva was detained, audio recordings leaked showing how Janeva assured Kamcev that she will help him out in the case she led against him if he pays millions to her intermediary Bojan Jovanovski – Boki 13. Gruevski points to the reports that Kamcev turned to a neighboring country, widely believed to be Bulgaria where he has extensive business interests, for help in procuring the wiretaps. According to Gruevski, this shows the extent to which not only major powers have interfered in Macedonian politics, during the political crisis designed to bring his Government down, but now also neighbors are influencing political events in Macedonia.

This means that the entire compromising material which includes information about the leadership of the country and of the ruling party, who were all involved in the scandal, is now held by the security services of this neighboring country. I’m talking about the entire material, not just the portion which was published so far. This material could be used to blackmail Macedonia’s leadership into new, additional concessions on top national issues, but also toward energy dependence, take-over of important monopoly industries and similar acts. Until now it was believed that high state officials are being blackmailed by major world powers, but now it seems that they are blackmailed by neighboring countries as well, and each additional day that this blackmailed Government remains in office constitutes major risk for Macedonia and leads to additional extorted concessions, Gruevski writes.

Macedonia is conducting negotiations with Bulgaria on forging a “shared narrative” about the histories of the two countries, in which Bulgarian historians demand that Macedonia acknowledges that major historic heroes were Bulgarian by origin, and are presented as such in Macedonian schools. Janeva’s intermediary Boki 13 was recorded in Kamcev’s home and while talking to him on the phone, during which he discussed meeting Prime Minister Zaev and Deputy Prime Minister Radmila Sekerinska, and it is also believed that the bag with money Boki 13 took from Kamcev had a GPS tracker, revealing the movement of the cash. Media outlets have even speculated that a pricey sofa Janeva extorted from a company close to Kamcev was bugged, possibly revealing other valuable details and conversations.

During the Colored Revolution that was staged to remove him from office, Gruevski would frequently warn that, under the guise of prosecuting crimes and corruption, there are foreign attempts to compromise top Government officials, and undermine Macedonia’s sovereignty by getting him or his associates to act against Macedonia’s interests.

Besides the racketeering scandal, Gruevski also warns about coming financial blows, several of which are linked to Zaev’s moves to unilaterally end important mining contracts. Gruevski notes that the contract to allow copper mining in Ilovica near Strumica to a Canadian company was being approved for well over a decade, including by the previous SDSM led Government, and that Zaev’s move to cancel it on environmental grounds could lead to huge damages for Macedonia. Similarly so with the cancellation of the Kazandol mine in Valandovo, the “suspicious take-over of the Feni smelter which is under arbitration”, the handling of the obligations toward the Greek owned Okta oil refinery, and even the possibility that a domestic oil company Makpetrol uses the “state our courts are in” to demand damages for itself.

These mistakes, or deliberate omissions, could cost the country up to 1.5 billion EUR in damages. Such a sum of money can’t be paid back from the state budget. In fact, it’s about a third of the annual budget. I’ve no idea how the Prime Minister intends to pay this back, unless his plan is to benefit himself from the cases and leave the next Government to deal with them. In any case, the people will be forced to pay up, sooner or later, Gruevski writes.

He also warns about the over-inflated plan to build a new clinic near Skopje worth well over half a billion EUR.

It’s clear to all that this is a mega criminal enterprise in the making. The clinic was supposed to cost 80 million EUR according to the initial project. It seems that the SDSM party is aware it will lose the next elections, and is now in a hurry to grab what it can on its way out, the former Prime Minister writes.

His comment comes on the day when disgraced Special Prosecutor Janeva, which hounded Gruevski and his chief Ministers, asked the other, larger OJO prosecutorial service to take over her case files, which seems to be the final blow to the Special Prosecutor’s Office. Also today, Frosina Remenski became the first SDSM party official to be interrogated by prosecutors over her role in the major corruption scandal. Gruevski was largely silent on the scandal so far, opting not to take the limelight from the daily flow of scandals and accusations.