The Deputy Prime Minister in charge of Fight against Corruption and Crime, Sustainable Development and Human Resources, Ljupco Nikolovski and the Director of the Financial Police, Arafat Muaremi, held Friday a joint press conference where they informed about grounds for suspicion of crimes committed by the Municipality of Petrovec officials.

Deputy Prime Minister Nikolovski pointed out that in May this year his office received a complaint on suspicion of abuse of office, money laundering and abuse of public procurement procedure by officials from the Municipality of Petrovec by an anonymous submitter.

The complaint was reviewed and processed by the office and in June this year, the entire documentation was sent to the Financial Police and the Anti-Corruption Commission for further action, said Deputy Prime Minister Nikolovski.

The Director of the Financial Police, Arafat Muaremi, informed that after reviewing the complaint, the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Prosecution of Organized Crime and Corruption filed charges against five individuals, including the current mayor of the municipality and three legal entities for crimes that caused damage to the budget of the Municipality of Petrovec in the amount of over half a million euros.

The charges have been filed three days before the start of the election campaign, in which the current mayor of Petrovec is again running as candidate for mayor of VMRO DPMNE.

The Financial Police is the new SPO for SDSM. And SDSM has been updated to VMRO2.0 Two days before the start of the election campaign, charges have been filed against an opposition candidate. Out of 300 submitted complaints, they decided to act on Petrovec. I do not go into whether he is guilty or not. But this SDSM is more like Gruevski’s VMRO, and that is more and more obvious, commented journalist Furkan Saliu.