Former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski may avoid his two-year jail sentence for the illicit secret purchase of a Mercedes if Macedonia’s Appeals Court fails to confirm the verdict by the end of October.
Macedonia’s ex-Prime Minister and former ruling VMRO DPMNE party leader Nikola Gruevski is involved in a legal race against time that will determine whether he will serve his two-year jail sentence which was handed down in a first-instance verdict in May, or not have to serve any jail time because the statute of limitations has passed.
Gruevski is expected to appear on Friday at the Skopje Appeals Court, where he is appealing against his jail sentence for his involvement in the illicit secret purchase of a luxury Mercedes back in 2012.
The hearing comes after the court on Thursday postponed the session for a day due to Gruevski’s absence, which his lawyers justified with his obligation to appear at another trial at the Skopje criminal court.
The Appeals Court has three options – to confirm the first-instance verdict, to alter the verdict or to order a retrial of the case, which is codenamed ‘Tank’.
But unless the court confirms the jail sentence and does so by the end of October, the entire case is under risk of passing the statute of limitations due to legal provisions.
Under the law, a criminal act passes the statute of limitations if the amount of time that has passed since the crime is twice as long as the longest possible jail sentence for the offence.
In this case, the prosecution accuses Gruevski of a crime that happened in 2012 and the highest possible sentence is three years. This means that six years have to pass since the crime was committed, which will be the case in October.
If the Appeals Court opts for a retrial, there will be not enough time to organise it.
Gruevski may walk free even if the court is late with reaching its decision.
The hearing at the Appeals Court is expected to last for two days, but prominent lawyer Zvonko Davidovic said that it may take a while longer for the verdict to be issued.
When the hearing ends, “the court is dismissed and everyone goes home, including the defendants. Then the Appeals Court will reach its decision and inform, in writing, the sides in the process,” Davidovic told Nezavisen Vesnik newspaper on Thursday.
“That may happen relatively quickly, in two or three weeks’ time, but it can also happen after several months,” he said.
Chief special prosecutor Katica Janeva on Wednesday told reporters that she was aware of the danger of the case passing the statute of limitations and urged the Appeals Court to bear that in mind as well.
If the Appeals Court confirms the verdict on time, Gruevski will have one more option, to appeal it to the Supreme Court.
But this will not prevent him from being summoned to prison while the Supreme Court considers the case.
In the first of five trials of Gruevski, which ended in May, he was found guilty of soliciting the purchase of a 580,000-euro Mercedes from then Interior Minister Jankuloska which he later planned to secretively use for his own private purposes.
In the same case, the Skopje Criminal Court in May jailed another defendant, former assistant interior minister Gjoko Popovski, for six-and-a-half years.
The trial of Jankuloska in the same case is being held separately due to her pregnancy.
