SkopjeDiem Macedonia in English
Regarding Parliament Speaker Afrim Gashi’s use of an official vehicle to go to a wedding in Kosovo, Interior Minister Pance Toskovski said on Tuesday the Ministry had completed intensive checks.
“It’s been determined that Speaker Gashi’s travel plan had been appropriately announced and registered in the record books following a previous notification from the Foreign Ministry, dated 16 August 2024,” he said.
The notification, in addition to Gashi, covers members of his family, security detail members, and three police official vehicles, Toskovski added.
As the Minister also explained, on 18 August, from 6:40 to 6:42 pm, six vehicles under police escort crossed the border-crossing, three and one of which were police and VIP ones, respectively.
“The practice of operations at the border crossings with regards to taking strengthened measures and activities for delegation security, as a result of an insufficient number of traffic tracks, means that while the delegation was passing through, border checks were carried out under a relaxed regime, according to Article 17 of the Border Control Law, which happened in this case, too, and lasted for a very short period of time.
The Passenger and Vehicle Control System controls determined that the holder of the delegation, as well as members of his family, who’d been announced for exiting the country, hadn’t been recorded in the System. It’s also been found that there was no complete compliance with the procedure to record all persons and passengers passing through the crossing in the system.
The Sever (North) Regional Centre will take appropriate measures to determine liability, according to the Ministry’s Collective Agreement, the determined oversights in operations against the shift manager at the crossing,” Minister Toskovski stressed.
Previously, SDSM had said the Blace border-crossing had been fully “privatised” for the Speaker’s needs, which had been approved by the Interior Ministry.
According to the party, all vehicles, including those in which there were private persons, were allowed to cross Blace without control procedures, which was a violation of the law. Later that day, the opposition party reacted also to the Minister’s explanation.
“It confirms all information we’ve published about the oversights at Blace. He is personally responsible for them,” the party said, adding again that he should step down instead of pointing the finger at subordinates.
VLEN said it regretted that SDSM was directing its anger over its election result at the wrong address.
The coalition asked why it hadn’t reacted the same way when then-party leader and PM Zoran Zaev and then-Health Minister Venko Filipce had driven motorcycles outside the country’s borders, accompanied by a state security detail.
When it comes to the no-confidence motion filed by Levica against the Speaker over seven items, including the group prayer in Parliament and the Sabedin Sinani case, the session for it has been scheduled for 3 September.
