Interior Minister Oliver Spasovski has lost touch with reality, said the opposition VMRO-DPMNE party, following Spasovski’s TV interview this evening. Faced with a growing list of scandals, including drug trafficking where the trail leads to the family of Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, Spasovski made a big announcement that the police was successful in cracking down on traffic violations in record number.

Spasovski did not answer about the pictures of him with criminals that are circulating, or how Turkish mobster Sedat Peker was given a police escort during his months long stay in Macedonia. He did not answer how was it possible that the Interior Ministry issued a passport to Kosovan ISIS member Fitim Dema. He completely ignored the fact that the police commissioner of Prilep which he appointed was busted for escorting a major drug shipment and that Macedonia ranked at its historic worst 111th place in the world in fighting corruption in the Transparency International list. Spasovski works as watchdog of the mafia, VMRO-DPMNE said in a press release.

Spasovski tried to lay the blame for the scandal in which passports were issued to regional mobsters and hitmen, as well as to ISIS members and money launderers of the Italian mafia by claiming that some of the passports were issued during the brief term of VMRO official Nake Culev as interim Interior Minister. He also alleged that one of the clerks who were arrested informed VMRO-DPMNE that the Ministry was issuing passports to criminals.

VMRO held a series of press conferences revealing names from the list of about 215 people who received fake Macedonian passports, which include a number of serious regional mobster. The involvement of international police organizations in both the mafia passports scandal and in the large marijuana seizure that apparently originated from a marijuana farm owned by a cousin of Prime Minister Zaev, is not a sign of trust in Macedonia by its international partners, but of Spasovski’s incompetence, VMRO said in the press release.t