Even as one of the responsible prosecutors from the Special Prosecutor’s Office washed her hands off the entire Boki 13 – Katica Janeva – Jordan Kamcev fiasco, the office issued a press release today to defend itself from the latest revelations in Janeva’s abuse of office.

In the press release, the SPO insisted that the tape doesn’t correspond to the actions of the SPO office and blames the Supreme Court for the release of Kamcev from house arrest. The tape, recorded on February 20th 2019 shows Boki 13, a close associate of Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva, assuring Jordan Orce Kamcev that he will be released from arrest in his posh villa north of Skopje by Monday, no latter than Tuesday, as he collects a bag of money from him. Boki 13 also tells Kamcev that “Katica” will not use the legal measures available to her to protract the proces in front of the Supreme Court which will help him have the house arrest order dropped. This is exactly what happened – the Supreme Court ordered Kamcev out of house arrest on March 4th 2019.

The SPO claims that they submitted a request that the house detention orders for the three defendants, Kamcev, Cvetan Pandeleski and Nenad Josifovik, are extended but this was rejected by the Supreme Court.

It is currently unclear whether there are other steps that the SPO could have taken to keep Kamcev and the other two defendants into house arrest, given that Boki 13 is specifically talking about “extraordinary legal measures” in the recording. Asking the court to keep the reject the requests from the requests from defendants to be released from house arrest is the bare minimum which the SPO could have done in the case.