The Special Public Prosecutor’s office has not commented on statements by European Commissioner Johannes Hahn and the findings of the European Commission’s report on Macedonia’s progress, the area of work of the SPO, as well as statements by MEP Eduard Kukan.
On Wednesday, we contacted the SPO but did not receive a comment on the statements or the progress report and yesterday when we called the office for public relations, we we were told that “the SPO does not comment on political statements”.
On Wednesday in Brussels, “Meta” asked whether Parliament should extend the mandate of the Special Public Prosecutor and should they have a special unit in court, Hahn replied that the most important thing is to have credible elections, then a new government, and that new government should take care of these issues.
Earlier, however, MEP Eduard Kukan, who together with colleagues Ivo Vajgl and Richard Howitt from the European Parliament brokered negotiations between the political parties and achieved the Pržino Agreement, stated that the Special Prosecutor’s Office should be independent in the performance of their work and that there had been some criticism of their work.
“The Special Prosecutor’s Office should be independent while conducting their work. There has been some criticism of her work, we sent a message to her and her office to work in accordance with the Pržino Agreement. What was agreed in the Przino Agreement should be implemented. SPO received a mandate and so far I see no reason for continuing it”, Kukan said, when he was asked to comment by “Meta” on the obstructions to the work of the SPO.
On October 25 the European diplomats in the country at a briefing with journalists, among other issues, said they were concerned that SPO had found themselves in the centre of the election campaigns of the parties, the government and the opposition, being used each for their own purposes, and said they believed it would be better that during this period the SPO should be seen less in public, and intensify its work on cases related to illegal wiretapping.
The last time the Special Public Prosecutor were in public was on October 20 when prosecutor Fatime Fetai and Lence Ristoska presented investigations for cases “Toplik” and “Tenders”.
The day before, the Special Public Prosecutor Katica Janeva with her team of prosecutors and investigators entered the Administration of Security and Counterintelligence (UBK) with two court order to collect documentation from special investigative brands and data from the monitoring communications systems. After several hours, Janeva, in a statement to the media, who were waiting in front of the Interior Ministry, accused the leadership of the UBK of obstructing her work and claimed that they would not hand over the data. Tensions between SPO-UBK came to a climax on the evening of October 21, when UBK expelled an investigator from the SPO who had been left onsite to observe, and in the meantime, another investigator was arrested and taken to the police station because, as reported by the Interior Ministry, he had photographed a building on Vodno, a property that is owned by the former Director of UBK, Saso Mijalkov.
Janeva last appeared at the trial of the “Putsch” case where she quarreled with Judge Ljubinka Basheska for postponing the trial indefinitely.
The latest announcement on their website is from October 28, when the SPO informed the public that with the help of an outside expert from Swedish company “Ericsson”, all the data had been retrieved that Janeva had requested by court order.
