The court ordered the detention of the former First Vice-President of the Government of North Macedonia, Artan Grubi, and the former Director of AD "Drazvna Lutrija" Perparim Bajrami, although both are inaccessible to the judicial authorities.
On December 17, the Criminal Court ordered them to be detained for thirty days in connection with the investigation of the State Lottery.
The Criminal Court clarified that they passed a decision on accepting the state prosecution's proposal for 30-day detention, after receiving a notification from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MUP) that "two persons for whom the state prosecution proposed a detention measure of up to their finding, i.e. deprivation of liberty, and related to the investigation of the State Lottery".
The Prosecutor's Office requested the detention of Grubi and Bajrami due to suspicion of embezzlement in the State Lottery. The Prosecutor's Office says that based on the collected evidence, there is a well-founded suspicion that the two co-perpetrators participated in actions that damaged the State Lottery, with the intention of obtaining an illegal financial benefit from the other.
Artan Grubi himself wrote on Facebook two days ago that he is not on the run and that he is on a private visit to Kosovo.
"As soon as I complete my duties, I will return home to my family," Grubi wrote.
The day after, when the police searched two of his locations, they did not find him at home.
Macedonian Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski said on December 16 that neither Artan Grubi nor Perparim Bajrami are on the territory of North Macedonia.
For Grubi, he said that "together with another person, a businessman, he left Macedonia in a vehicle with diplomatic plates and eventually headed for our northern neighbor Kosovo", and for Bajrami, he said that he had not been in the country for a long time.
Artan Grubi, along with appellate judge Enver Beyeti, was placed on the State Department's "blacklist," published on December 9, for involvement in significant corruption, political interference, and attempts to denigrate the judiciary.
The rationale is that they received bribes in order to influence the court proceedings in connection with the criminal verdict against the former director of the Directorate of Security and Counterintelligence Affairs (UBK) Saša Mijalkov for the "Target" case initiated by the Special Public Prosecutor's Office (SPO), which related to mass wiretapping .
State Public Prosecutor Ljupco Kočevski then said that a case was initiated to provide evidence for possible criminal liability for persons who are on the blacklist in the United States of America.
Grubi is a member of the opposition Democratic Union for Integration (DUI), a former deputy and vice-president of the Government in the previous government of the Social Democratic Alliance of Macedonia (SDSM) and DUI.
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