The electoral fraud trial of Macedonia’s ex-premier Nikola Gruevski and other ex-officials heard tapes of wiretapped conversations that the prosecution claims shows their involvement in vote-rigging schemes.
The Skopje court on Friday continued to hear more of over 1,000 previously unreleased wiretapped audio recordings of senior ex-officials as evidence in the case against former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and some of his former ministers and close associates who are accused of rigging past elections.
In some of the tapes played in court on Friday, the voices of former Interior Minister Grodana Jankulovska and of former Gruevski’s cabinet chief, Martin Protugjer, could be heard mulling prosecution for alleged ‘false impersonation’ of two journalists who in 2011, ahead of the elections that year, revealed a big electoral fraud scandal.
The journalists from the now defunct A1 TV aired audio recordings in 2011 of telephone conversations that they said prove that Gruevski’s then ruling VMRO DPMNE party bullied civil servants into providing lists of voters for that year’s general elections in exchange for posts or other favours.
In order to get the civil servants to talk, the journalists pretended to be calling from the VMRO DPMNE call centre.
“It was now on TV… They are calling those from the lists asking them whether they would vote for VMRO DPMNE, and they say ‘yes yes’, we will vote. Some say, they will employ my cousin, another said that she got help for in vitro [fertilisation] and so on,” Jankuloska could be heard saying to Protugjer.
“There’s no way we can fight A1… we must sue them,” Protugjer is heard replying, to which Jankulovska suggests suing the journalists.
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