Teams from the ruling SDSM party and the opposition VMRO-DPMNE will meet today to discuss the law on state prosecutors, which is at the center of the political crisis sparked when Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva was charged with wide-spread corruption and abuse of office.
VMRO-DPMNE demands that a new organized crime unit is set up and that it is allowed to transparently and thoroughly investigate the scandal revolving around Janeva, which likely affects top officials from the Zaev regime and his SDSM party. Zaev demands that the new unit, set up to replace Janeva’s disgraced SPO, is not allowed to investigate the racketeering allegations, or any allegations related to his Government for that matter.
The teams are also expected to discuss the fate of the dozens of criminal charges filed by Janeva, almost exclusively against VMRO-DPMNe officials. Janeva sent out a highly controversial order from detention, that her case files are given to the OJO/PPO office of public prosecutors, which is also politically controlled by SDSM. OJO chief Public Prosecutor Ljubomir Joveski, an important ally to Zaev, is busily approving the requests that prosecutors transferred from Janeva’s SPO team to the OJO are allowed to continue working on their old cases.
Today it was revealed that Lile Stefanova, one of the prosecutors who were actually interrogated to determine her role in the extortion scandal, will be allowed by Joveski to continue to work on several investigations aimed against VMRO-DPMNE officials, such as the highly politicized claims that officials from this party were involved in electoral manipulation, the investigation into the construction of two major highways supported by Chinese credit lines and also the older case alleging that SDSM and DUI party officials took bribes from Deutsche Telekom in 2005 to allow the company to maintain its dominant position in the Macedonian market.
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