The OJO office of state prosecutors was quick to threaten opposition leader Hristijan Mickoski, after he announced that he was given copies of sworn testimonies given in the major racketeering scandal. Mickoski said he will give the prosecutors time to investigate the case properly, but if they attempt to cover up the scandal, he will publish the names of the SDSM party politicians involved in the extortion of millions of euros from various businesses.
OJO insisted that the whistleblower protection act doesn’t apply in this case and threatened the VMRO-DPMNE party leader with criminal charges for obstructing their investigation (such as it is). And yet, no similar urgency was felt when Zoran Zaev spent most of 2015 publishing illegally recorded phone conversations given to him by rogue intelligence officers – on the contrary, the move was welcomed by diplomats in Macedonia as important for revealing crime and corruption, and the charges that were filed against Zaev for his role in the wiretapping were withdrawn by now disgraced Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva.
More recently, Zaev announced at a press conference that OJO prosecutors are investigating two top officials of his Government and that arrests will be made soon. Asked months later what happened with these investigations, he sheepishly acknowledged that his statement tipped off the two officials who realised they are being watched and quickly covered up their tracks.
I had them dismissed but it’s possible that with my desire to be transparent and with my comments I blocked some investigative actions and they all took defensive positions and ultimately the investigations could not be completed. Our intent was to have them put in prison if the investigation had run its course. But they were dismissed, Zaev said. OJO did not prosecute him for impeding this investigation into the two officials who Zaev said ran public institutions.
No investigation was launched even after the former Justice Minister Blerim Bexheti publicly announced that Zaev pressured him to influence the DUI party appointed members of the Judicial Council in order to get the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Jovo Vangelovski removed from his position. Vangelovski was often the only protection defendants had from the politically driven criminal charges initiated by Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva, and Zaev had his wish earlier this week when Vangelovski was dismissed. Zaev acknowledged that he spoke with Bexheti about Vangelovski, but the prosecutors see no reason to prosecute him for this blatant interference in the independence of the judiciary.
And yet the same OJO prosecutors who can never find any fault with Zaev, and who allowed Janeva to roam free for months, discarding her phones and ordering the formatting of her office computers, are quick to threaten the opposition leader against publishing evidence of their own inaction. It’s by now clear that witnesses, but also possibly defendants in the racketeering case have pointed to officials in Zaev’s Government as involved in the extortion attempts.
Prosecutor Vilma Ruskoska so far questioned only two top SDSM party officials – Aleksandar Kiracovski and Frosina Remenski, as well as two Mayors – Natasa Petrovska from Bitola and Stefan Bogoev from Skopje’s Karpos district. None of them have been detained. Mickoski said that if the inaction of the prosecutors, which amounts to a cover-up, continues, he will have no option but to publish the names of all politicians involved in the scandal.
Even Janeva would have likely escaped detention, if it weren’t for the “La Verita tapes” – the recordings published by this Italian newspaper which revealed how Janeva assures Jordan Orce Kamcev, the businessman charged in one of her cases, that “all will be well” after he pays the required sum of money to her intermediary Bojan Jovanovski – Boki 13. Ruskoska and her OJO prosecutors had to be called out by an American diplomat to finally order the interrogation and eventually detention of Katica Janeva.
And even after she was detained, Janeva is still allowed to give orders to her SPO staff, to the point of de facto ordering that the institution is shut down and all its case files given to OJO prosecutors – giving Zaev a chance to continue the campaign of political persecution of the opposition initiated by Janeva.
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