VMRO-DPMNE President Hristijan Mickoski rejected Zoran Zaev’s request that he names Vilma Ruskoska as the next Special Prosecutor. In an interview with Republika, Mickoski warns that there is an on-going attempt to mitigate the scope of the scandal that has brought down Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva, and that the Zaev Government needs to keep this position in order to avoid responsibility for its own role in the high level crimes that are being uncovered each day.

The Government did not propose a Special Prosecutor’s Office which will be truly independent and will go after actual crimes. Their intent is to have an SPO that would be tailor made to suit Zaev’s needs and the needs of his criminal octopus. Now that the Prime Minister assured himself in the fact that the SPO is compromised, and this happened mainly because of the political influence he himself and his people had over the office, which led to the corrupt scandal involving its chief Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva, so now he basically accepted the VMRO-DPMNE proposal to end the SPO and to form a new unit which would be part of the regular state prosecutor’s service and would investigate high crimes and corruption. But, the problem now is that Zaev wants to push through his own proposal for this new SPO, and to have compromised people run it, including some of the same people who were in Janeva’s SPO. The aim here is to help Zaev cling on to power, after the first SPO allowed him to grab power, Mickoski told Republika.

After Janeva was forced to resign on Monday, due to the allegations that she was involved in extorting millions of euros from businessmen she threatened with criminal charges, Zaev held a press conference during which he proposed a new SPO law and nominated another loyalist Vilma Ruskoska to run the “new SPO” office. VMRO-DPMNE rejected this proposal outright.

Zaev confirmed what I’ve said all along – that Ruskoska is his own choice for a prosecutor, and that he wants to replace Katica Janeva with another just like her. It is clear that his proposal is nothing more than mockery of the laws and the rule of law. How can we have a woman who combined incompetence and taking political orders fight crime or restore justice? All that’s lacking here is for Zaev to nominate Dobrila Kacarska to become the Chief Supreme Court Justice and we might just as well slap the SDSM party logo on all these judicial institutions. Zaev, who praised Katica Janeva, now praises Vilma Ruskoska using the exact same words, which should concern us. The first prosecutor is involved in a scandal worth millions of euros, and the second one is ostensibly working to uncover the scandal but somehow she never gets around to charging Janeva, Janeva’s collaborators from the Government, or the Prime Minister. Please, this is a serious situation and we can’t allow such people to sit in so important institutions, Mickoski said.

The Government needs 81 votes to push its proposal through Parliament. Mickoski warned Zaev that he is no longer calling the shots and will not be allowed to pass a law that undermines the entire prosecutorial service without the largest opposition party. In his interview with Republika, Mickoski lists the series of scandals that are engulfing the Zaev regime and calls for early general elections.