Prosecutor Lejla Kadriu, who was briefly part of the now disgraced SPO special prosecutors unit, gave an extensive interview detailing the massive violations and political persecutions that were carried out by this institution. Speaking to Alfa TV, Kadriu said that the SPO unit, led by Katica Janeva, who has since been sentenced for extortion, operated as a political unit of the SDSM party and was devoted to running politically motivated investigations of top VMRO-DPMNE officials.
At one point I came out of my office to get coffee and there were Zoran Zaev and Radmila Sekerinska, crouched over some documents with prosecutors Lence Ristovska, Fatime Fetai, Lile Stefanova and Gavril Bubevski. I asked them what are they doing there, how can they be inside the prosecutor’s office? Ristovska told me that they are dropping off the wiretap documents. Excuse me? Handing over documents without a report of what was admitted, while the main prosecutor Janeva is away? But obviously these four prosecutors were running the show. The entire country was crashing down, Zoran Zaev was waving with wiretaps from the town square, and the prosecution was admitting them without even signing off on what was received. Unheard of, said Kadriu.
Janeva was widely considered incompetent for the job, despite fawning press coverage in the domestic and international press and strong international support, and Kadriu told Bogdan Ilievski of Alfa TV that it was the four other prosecutors who were actually running the SPO unit, especially Bubevski.
Kadriu was quickly sidelined from the SPO – she says that Janeva told her that she is “not a team player”. In the months that she worked there she also witnessed extremely careless spending of the significant budget that was given to Janeva, including drunken parties and excessive bonuses, which are the subject of a criminal investigation.
The SPO was used to prosecute the top leadership of VMRO, and pave way for Zaev’s powergrab in 2017, and the subsequent imposed name change. The politization of the SPO unit went to such lengths that in one instance, Kadriu says that she had an adviser of Interior Minister Oliver Spasovski (SDSM) come to her office, with full knowledge of the case she is working on, to instruct her that the investigation needs to be expanded and to include additional officials. “An advisor of a political appointeee came to me, a sworn public prosecutor, to tell me what to do with my case!? I told him to get out of my office”, Kadriu says in her interview.
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