VMRO-DPMNE member of Parliament Trajce Dimkov resigned from the Committee set up to vet police offices and agents being transferred from the UBK intelligence agency into the newly formed ANB agency. Dimkov said that the work of the Committee has been compromised from the start, as allegations grow that the transfer of agents is being used to purge UBK from everybody perceived as not sufficiently loyal to the ruling SDSM and DUI parties.

Reports of widespread abuse as the new ANB intelligence agency is being set up indicate that it may be even worse than the notorious UBK

The selection of ANB officers is based on subjective and even political criteria, instead of clear, objective and pre-determined conditions. My impression is that the entire process was a farce and was put in place to justify personnel decisions which had already been made. The test of integrity that was provided in the law to create the ANB was not applied. The recommendations from the Anti-Corruption Agency were ignored. Finally, for undisclosed reasons, even the lie detector test was not applied, Dimkov said.

Interior Minister Oliver Spasovski today revealed that 50 UBK agents were found to be a security risk and will be assigned to other institutions, away from the ANB. A number of agents also did not apply to join the ANB and will be distributed elsewhere in the Interior Ministry.

The UBK was one of the main generators of the 2015 political crisis, when agents loyal to the SDSM party abused the systems to wiretap conversations of top Government officials and shared the tapes with the SDSM party. The two officers who were accused of performing the wiretapping were re-hired by Spasovski, who considers them heroes given the service they provided to his party. One of them, Zvonko Kostovski, will now join the ANB, while the other, Gjoko Lazarevski, will remain in the Interior Ministry. Both are now involved in the latest scandal revealing the entire scandal as a sham, by their alleged ring-leader Zoran Verusevski.

Zaev’s spy chief distances himself from the 2015 wiretapping scandal, admits that the tapes were manipulated

I fear that with this process we are simply exacerbating the problem and creating an institution which will not be trusted from the start. If there is an honest intent to reform the intelligence service, we need to review the process of selection of ANB candidates, Dimkov said in his resignation letter addressed to Prime Minister Zoran Zaev.