Macedonia Court Confirms Former PM Gruevski's Jail Sentence

Maceodnia's Appeals Court on Friday confirmed former prime minister Nikola Gruevski's two-year jail sentence.

It confirmed a sentence previously issued by the Skopje Criminal Court in a case codenamed "Tank" in which he was found guilty of illegally soliciting the secret purchase of a 580,000-euro Mercedes from former Interior Minister Gordana Jankuloska, which he planned to use for his own purposes.

The court rejected his appeal "as ungrounded" and "confirmed fully the first-instance verdict", it said on Friday.

In the same case, the Appeal Court reduced the sentence of another defendant, former assistant interior minister Gjoko Popovski, from six-and-a-half years to four-and-a-half years in jail.

The Appeal Court verdict means that Gruevski's sentence is now final.

Gruevski has one more option, however, which is to appeal to the Supreme Court and seek the postponement of the sentence.

But this will not necessarily prevent him from being summoned to prison while the Supreme Court considers the case.

The Criminal Court sentenced Gruevski and Popovski to jail in May for the crime that took place in 2012.

Gruevski has insisted that this and other ongoing court cases against him were a political set-up fixed by the new government led by the Social Democrats, SDSM.

Gruevski was prime minister from 2006 to 2016. His right-wing VMRO DPMNE party was ousted in 2017 after a prolonged political crisis in which he and his close associates were accused of installing authoritarian rule and corruption.

The court previously separated the trial of the third defendant in the same case, the former Interior Minister Gordana Jankuloska, due to her then pregnancy.

Her trial in the Criminal...