Police ordered a manhunt for ex-Deputy Prime Minister Artan Grubi – who has vanished from his home since being accused of corruption.
North Macedonia’s Interior Ministry on Wednesday issued an arrest warrant for ex-Deputy Prime Minister Artan Grubi, who has vanished since being accused of corruption.
The former head of the state-run lottery, Perparim Bajrami, is also on the arrest warrant list, as are three others suspected of embezzlement of illegal assets. Ex-Prime Minister Dimitar Kovacevski and the government’s former general secretary, Metodija Dimovski, are also on the ministry’s suspect list.
The warrants for Grubi and Bajrami came a day after prosecutors announced they could not be found at their residences. On Tuesday, a Skopje court ordered 30 days of detention for both Grubi and Bajrami.
On Monday, the Skopje Basic Prosecution announced it had ordered an investigative procedure against two persons on “reasonable suspicion… of embezzlement” while “a procedure has been initiated for another four persons for … abuse of official position and authority”.
“The collected evidence gives rise to a reasonable suspicion that the two co-perpetrators, as responsible persons in the Joint Stock Company for Organising Games of Chance ‘State Lottery’ … [embezzled money] during 2023, through the exercise of their special authorizations and duties,” it said.
According to the prosecution, the cost to the state-run company is estimated at more than 500 million denars, equal to more than 8 million euros.
Grubi has been at large since December 15, when his home was raided. Later he released a statement on Facebook saying he was out of the country “on a private visit”.
“Please do not slander and speculate. I have travelled with my documents and my personal police security has been informed. As soon as I finish my obligations, I will be back home,” he said.
Officials in Skopje offered another version of his escape, with Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski saying that “ex-Deputy Prime Minister [Grubi] headed to our neighbour Kosovo, together with a businessman, in a vehicle with diplomatic licence plates”.
Sources from Kosovo Police confirmed to BIRN on Wednesday that they have received the arrest warrant from North Macedonia’s authorities.
The US State Department on December 9 said it was adding Grubi and Judge Enver Behxheti to its blacklist “for their involvement in significant corruption by accepting bribes to undermine judicial processes tied to the criminal conviction of Saso Mijalkov”, the former head of North Macedonia’s secret police.
Members of Grubi’s immediate family had also been blacklisted, the US State Department said.
Grubi, a top official in the main ethnic Albanian opposition party, the Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, has been a prominent politician in North Macedonia for the past decade.
On social media, Grubi said he was shocked about his blacklisting. “As someone who dedicated his public life to the protection of Western democratic values, and who always worked hard for the country’s membership of NATO and the EU, this decision concerns me personally,” he wrote.
A close associate of the DUI leader, Ali Ahmeti, and the party’s main mouthpiece, Grubi was First Deputy PM in the government led by the Social Democrats from 2020 until elections earlier this year, when it lost power. During that time, he was also Minister for the Political System and for Relations Between [ethnic] Communities.
Two days after the US State Department announcement, Grubi said he would leave politics.
