VMRO-DPMNE member of Parliament Antonio Milososki, who was part of the negotiations on the law on state prosecutors, said that it is necessary to investigate the likely illegal awarding of hundreds of thousands of euros in bonuses by disgraced Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva.
Organized crime prosecutors yesterday raided Janeva’s former SPO office, and were reportedly seizing documents about her spending.
The awarding of the controversial and oversized bonuses by Katica Janeva to herself and to the other prosecutors needs to be investigated under the articles covering abuse of office and misuse of public funds. This should especially apply to the period after June 2017 (after which SPO no longer had any mandate to initiate new cases – a legal clause which Janeva completely ignored). We should take it as a mitigating factor if any of her prosecutors decides to return the unlawfully received bonuses to the state coffers, Milososki said.
On top of the political abuse of the SPO office to install the SDSM party to power, and her alleged extortion of millions of euros from businessmen she was prosecuting, Janeva has long been suspected of playing it loose with the budget of her office. She would hire political activists of the SDSM party and created a para-police unit of investigators which was later promoted to top positions in the regular police force after SDSM seized power. According to media reports, some of the SPO funding had foreign or even unknown sources and Janeva used it to give bonuses which amounted to over 150.000 EUR to herself and to tens of thousands of euros for her top deputies.
Janeva excused her the huge budget and bonuses for her staff insisting that they are fighting crime and face serious dangers – had their heads in the bag as is the local expression. But, with the revelations that her office was extorting money from the alleged criminals it was prosecuting, and with the reports of her flashy lifestyle and that of her deputies, which allegedly included personalized Louis Vuitton bags, the opinion quickly turned against the SPO.
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