The criminal charge against Agency for National Security Director Bojan Hristovski concerning alleged falsification of the TOEFL certificate from the Plovdiv-based Julia Co. school has been rejected by the Prosecutor’s Office.
Prosecutor Vladimir Miloseski of the Skopje Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office has found that Hristovski was getting ready to take the English test at that school, but he did so online three days later, that is, on 26 March 2022 (Saturday).
The Office has also found that that certificate’s validity expired two years after that and wasn’t valid when he was appointed to the position of Agency head. It cannot be determined whether such a test exists due to the rules of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the Office explained on Thursday.
“The test results and certificate are available electronically 6-10 days after the test through the user profile of the person that took the test, while if over two years pass, as is the case here, ETS cannot give a notification or verify the results and test”, the institution also said.
According to the Office, in March, it received incomplete answers from Bulgaria’s authorities because they hadn’t been able to find the school’s owner, while in 2022, Julia Co. was registered for translation activities, translation services, legalization of documents, and organization of private language schools. The document submitted to the Office as a criminal charge and Hristovski’s TOEFL certificate differ visually, in form and content, it was added in the press-release.
However, the institution is adamant that despite the dilemmas about the certificates, Miloseski hasn’t found Hristovski’s actions contain elements of a crime, that is, it pointed out that even if there was a dilemma about the document issued by Julia Co., according to the secured documentation, it hadn’t caused a legal consequence, nor was it of any importance to the legal relations and appointment to the top position of the Agency because another valid document on command of foreign language was presented in the file.
“For those reasons, the elements of the reported crimes are not contained in the reported person’s activities”, the Office also said.
The institution hasn’t found a crime with regards to the higher education degree of Hristovski, issued in 2023 by the University of Skopje (University of Tourism and Management), either.
Through the same certificate, that is, the one the Office has said is invalid, Hristovski was elected also as Assistant Professor of Criminalistic Science at the Faculty of Security. He was appointed Agency Director in October of last year. Hristovski was an Interior Ministry employee.
According to his claims, he stopped being a member and party official within VMRO-DPMNE in December 2023, when, following a decision that he’d been discriminated along political lines, then-Interior Minister Oliver Spasovski rehired him at the Ministry.
Commenting on the Office’s decision, SDSM described the institution as an instrument of VMRO-DPMNE in the party’s PR strategy.
“The rejection of the charges is at the very least unserious, tendentious, and politically motivated, especially considering the fact that there have already been at least four verdicts, including one against the Debar hospital director, as well as against head-teachers of two schools, who confessed that the TOEFL certificate obtained by them from Julia Co. had been falsified”, the party stated.
SDSM also asked why there was a change of VMRO-DPMNE’s stand on the Prosecutor-General, that is, how it was possible for Ljupco Kocevski to suddenly become “the best Prosecutor” when he’d previously been considered the “worst and most corrupt one”.
On the other hand, VMRO-DPMNE said not even the Office, as well as the judges elected in Zajas [by DUI] and Strumica [by SDSM], were able to hide the truth, adding that it had been confirmed again that SDSM was a “fake news factory”.