Former deputy prime minister of North Macedonia Artan Grubi is included in the “black list” of the USA.
„As a person who has dedicated his public life to the defense of Western democratic values and has always worked tirelessly for the country's membership in NATO and the European Union, this decision affects me directly and personally. I will commit to the maximum, together with all our friends and partners with whom we shared the vision and worked for years for the integration of the country in the Euro-Atlantic structures, to fully clarify this issue. "Transparency and commitment to democratic values will continue to be the main pillar of my every action," Grubi wrote on his Facebook profile.
On International Anti-Corruption Day, the US State Department announced that Grubi, along with North Macedonia Court of Appeals Judge Enver Bejeti, and their families had been “blacklisted” for their involvement in " significant corruption" by accepting bribes to undermine the legal proceedings against the former director of the Security and Counterintelligence Service during the government of Nikola Gruevski Sasho Miyalkov, who from 2022. is also on the “blacklist” of the USA, and also because of corruption.
„Tonight, unlike other times, SDSM and DSI are silent. And Artan Grubi is on the black list of criminal suspects in the same government and at the same time when Venko Filipche (the current chairman of the SDSM) was a minister. We ask if the DSI leadership will distance itself from Artan Grubi, will SDSM publicly welcome the State Department's decision to put Grubi on the “blacklist”, do SDSM and DSI still believe that the efforts of the VMRO-DPMNE-led government to fight corruption in the judicial system are pressure on the judicial system? How is Ali Ahmeti (the chairman of the DSI)? Will he continue to pretend to be a concerned patriot for the Albanians or will he accept the truth that DSI is a highly criminalized party”, VMRO-DPMNE reacted after the information about the decision of the US State Department was made public.
This was followed by a reaction from the SDSM, from where they welcomed the decision of the US State Department “to put new persons from the country on the blacklist” and defined as “extremely significant” the support of North Macedonia's strategic partners in the fight against corruption and crime.
„All suspicions of corruption must be investigated and sanctioned uncompromisingly by the judicial authorities in North Macedonia. We encourage the entire judicial system in the country to work diligently and without hesitation to deal with all forms of crime and corruption in order to guarantee justice and equality for all citizens," reads the message of the SDSM.
In the “black list” of the USA from North Macedonia are also the former chief prosecutor Katitsa Yaneva, the current mayor of the municipality of Karposh in Skopje, Stevco Yakimovski, who were announced in March, at the end of last year, on the “black list” the former deputy prime minister and businessman Kocho Angushev was included, from June 2023. the list was supplemented with the mayor of Struga Ramiz Merko, businessman Yordan Kamchev, his mother, Russian businessman Sergey Samsonenko and his wife Irina, and from 2022. there are the names of former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and the former director of the Security and Counterintelligence Service during Gruevski's government, Sasho Miyalkov.