VMRO-DPMNE Vice President Aleksandar Nikoloski repeated his accusations that outgoing Prime Minister Zoran Zaev is at the center of the major racketeering scandal. Zaev filed slander charges against Nikoloski over his earlier similar comments.

We know why Zaev is doing this. He has lost touch with reality and is dealing with ancillary issues and he is likely surrounded with a team which assures him that the courts are under his control and will deliver him a verdict saying that he is not involved in Racket. Zaev is desperate to get away from the Racket scandal because it is collapsing his political situation and in due time it will lead to his criminal accountability, Nikoloski said.

He dismissed Zaev’s claim that he was not informed of the extortion and that he reported it to state prosecutors as soon as he found out about it.

If Zaev really reported the case to state prosecutors, let’s see the report. There must be some written trail if he really did that. I doubt he did. I believe this is a clumsy marketing attempt on his part and the people around him who are advising him how to wash his hands. They’re just pushing him deeper in, Nikoloski said.

In a TV interview, Nikoloski pointed to the fact that judges who are close to Zaev are being appointed and promoted in the judiciary. “How is it that people close to him are always deemed the most competent? Zaev has full control over the judiciary and the prosecutors and all the trials are going his way. If the Racket scandal didn’t go public through the press, it would never have been processed by the judiciary”, Nikolosi told the Alsat TV.