The competent public prosecutor from the Skopje High Public Prosecutor’s Office has issued a decision accepting the objection of AD Elektrani against the order to stop the investigation into criminal acts – abuse of the public tender procedure, awarding a public procurement contract or public-private partnership, as well as Money Laundering, against a total of 13 individuals and one legal entity, related to the procurement of fuel oil for the Negotino Thermal Power Plant. With the decision, the Skopje High Public Prosecutor’s Office has obliged the Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office for Prosecuting Organized Crime and Corruption (PPO OCC) to continue the procedure, and the competent prosecutor in the first instance has been given additional guidelines for action.
Noting, above all, weaknesses in the prepared expert reports on which the public prosecutor from the Public Prosecutor’s Office OCC based his decision to stop the investigation, the Skopje High Public Prosecutor’s Office requested to continue the procedure in order to determine all individual actions of the suspects, especially whether and who took direct actions or actions of assistance with which the legal entity ESM, through the misuse of specifically allocated funds from the state budget, and under the guise of using a preferential legal basis from Article 23 of the Public Procurement Law, enabled large-scale material benefits for one of the suspects and his legal entity. The Skopje High Public Prosecutor’s Office instructed the Public Prosecutor’s Office OCC to collect and analyze more data from several other institutions, as well as to order new expert reports in order to precisely examine all circumstances and determine possible criminal liability.
