Inside North Macedonia’s Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Skopje, five employees say they were drawn into a system where the fate of criminal cases could be quietly steered behind closed doors. Two ultimately chose to take a step rarely seen within such a system. Their testimonies describe how, they allege, cases were directed to specific prosecutors at the instruction of their superior — pressure, they say, aimed at influencing how cases would unfold in court, a practice that, if confirmed, would undermine one of the judiciary’s most important safeguards: the neutral allocation of cases.
Reported by: Maja Jovanovska
Convincing employees from the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Skopje to speak publicly against their then superior, Mustafa Hajrullahi, was neither quick nor simple.
Their testimonies were critical. Our objective was clear: to document, on record, how the alleged irregularities inside the Prosecutor’s Office unfolded — concerns they had already reported to multiple institutions.
Only two agreed to speak publicly.The first is Daniela Lape, a junior officer for professional affairs responsible for registration and case allocation to higher prosecutors. The second is Ruzica Slezenkovska, a former expert associate at the Skopje Public Prosecutor’s Office, who moved office to the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in 2024.
“It took us a long time to gather the courage to raise our voices. The harassment began in 2020. We endured it for nearly four years,” Slezenkovska told IRL.
In July 2024, they formally reported their superior to State Public Prosecutor Ljupco Kocevski and Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski. They expected institutional action. Instead, they say, no protective measures followed — and the pressure intensified.
With no institutional safeguards in place, they decided to act independently. They filed criminal complaints against Hajrullahi for workplace harassment.
However, during their statements to the prosecutor, additional suspicions surfaced — including potential abuse of official position and authority.
“It was the summer of 2024,” Daniela Lape recounted. “Prosecutor Mustafa Hajrullahi called me through his secretary to his office and told me that the ‘Postal Bank’ case should be assigned to prosecutor Jovan Cvetanovski. We had to wait two or three days for the rotation to pass so the case could formally reach the prosecutor marked with Roman numeral II — Jovan Cvetanovski.”
Lape says the instructions were not limited to a single case.
She recalls receiving the same directive in the “Serta” case — involving a public tender for maintaining hygiene in government institutions. The message, she says, was identical: the file was to be assigned to Prosecutor Jovan Cvetanovski. According to her testimony, this was not an isolated intervention.
“I remember another case — the one concerning the bonuses of the Special Prosecutor’s Office (SPO),” Lape told IRL. “I was called to his office. Prosecutor Natasha Godzovska and his two children were there. He told me, point-blank, without any fuss, to assign the case to Jovan Cvetanovski.”
The pattern she describes suggests more than routine administrative guidance. It raises questions about whether case allocation — a procedural safeguard meant to ensure neutrality — was being directed from above.
Within the office hierarchy, Hajrullahi’s instructions were not open to debate. Employees subordinate to him carried them out. But according to the testimonies gathered, directives about case allocation were accompanied by something more — explicit warnings about professional consequences.
“If I can force prosecutors out of office, what do you think I can do to you?” Lape recalls as one of Hajrullahi’s threats.
The message was unmistakable: institutional power could be exercised downward. Both women describe his office as the setting where such pressure was most frequently applied.
“He would say things like, ‘“I swear on my father’s grave I will fire you. I swear on my children I will fire you. You don’t know who you’re dealing with.” I fired one of the prosecutors — what do you think I can do to you?’” Slezenkovska told IRL.
The language, they say, was not rhetorical. It was intended to intimidate.
According to their accounts, once Hajrullahi learned which employees had formally reported him for harassment, the pressure escalated. The objective, they allege, shifted toward forcing them to withdraw their statements.
“It was a superior–subordinate relationship, and he demanded that I submit to his influence,” Lape said. “He would tell me: ‘Don’t go where you can’t come back from. You have a child to look after – think about what you’re doing. You’re swimming in deep water now—and you don’t have a lifeline.’ He put enormous pressure on me. I remember that day felt like a year. But he failed in his attempt to make us withdraw our statements.”
For Slezenkovska, the intimidation extended beyond the workplace. She says she received threats from unknown individuals calling from disposable numbers. At one point, letters containing threatening messages were left outside her door.
“Suspicious phone calls began late at night, mostly after midnight. They started in October 2024, after we filed the complaint,” Slezenkovska told us. “On two occasions they said: ‘Ruze, you’re next.’ In the last call I received, at 4 a.m., they told me: ‘You’re finished.’”
The timing was consistent. The pattern appeared deliberate.Beyond the anonymous threats, Slezenkovska also described what she characterized as increasingly aggressive behavior from Hajrullahi himself.
“He would tell me: ‘I’ll put you under special investigative measures. I’ll send you to detention. You’ll lose your job. You don’t know who you’re dealing with,’” she recounted about the threats she received.
The message, she says, was unmistakable: institutional tools could be turned against them.
The sustained pressure instilled fear. But what they describe as more devastating than the threats themselves was the institutional silence that followed their public warning about alleged irregularities in the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office. They were not treated as whistleblowers.
“We are the only whistleblowers in this country, and we were not treated as such,” Slezenkovska said. “If we had been treated as whistleblowers, our identities would only have been revealed after an indictment was filed.”Instead, she says, they were left without protection — exposed, isolated, and subjected to ongoing public attacks led by their superior, Mustafa Hajrullahi.
Prosecutor and “Whistleblower”
The testimonies of the two women bring the timeline back to 31 October 2024. That evening, the central news broadcast on the national television station Kanal 5 aired an unusual report. The segment featured covert footage from a meeting at a café in central Skopje between two individuals whose identities were blurred.
The covert recording broadcast by Kanal 5 was submitted to the TV station by Mustafa Hajrullahi himself. As he publicly stated at the time, his intention was to expose alleged abuses within the state Public Prosecutor’s Office. In the televised segment, Hajrullahi appeared on camera and said he had received the recording from a “whistleblower” — a term commonly used to describe an insider (person from an institution) who discloses wrongdoing within that institution.
“The footage shows a female person handing a folder containing information originating from the Public Prosecutor’s Office to another female person,” Hajrullahi said. “The whistleblower told me that one of them is a close family member of a high-ranking public prosecutor.”- stated Hajrullahi at that time.
He publicly claimed to suspect that documents from an oversight report concerning his own Higher Prosecutor’s Office had been shared during the meeting.
The broadcast triggered a strong public reaction after journalist Miroslava Simonovska from the newspaper Sloboden Pechat revealed that she was one of the individuals shown in the video. The other person was the daughter of State Public Prosecutor Ljupco Kocevski.
“The café was almost empty,” Simonovska told IRL. “Several people sat at a nearby table, but later moved. Honestly, I suspect the table was bugged, and that the prosecutor’s daughter was either physically followed or her phone communications were monitored.”
Just days before the covert video surfaced, Simonovska had published a report stating that an internal review was underway at the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Skopje concerning a public procurement abuse case that had collapsed without judicial resolution.
Simonovska told us that no internal prosecutorial documents were exchanged during the meeting. She believes the release of the footage was intended as a warning — a message to stop investigating and publishing stories related to the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office.
The Skopje Prosecutor’s Office opened a case against an unknown perpetrator for the illegal recording of Simonovska. To date, no one has been identified as responsible.
Yet the video proved to be only the opening salvo in what developed into an institutional and media confrontation between Mustafa Hajrullahi and State Public Prosecutor Ljupco Kocevski.
Subsequent reporting suggests that the media escalation was not incidental.
An Important Letter to Prime Minister Mickoski and Three Other Institutions
IRL established that three months before Hajrullahi’s intensified media presence began, five employees from the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office sent formal letters on 19 July 2024 to four senior institutional addresses.
Identical letters were delivered to State Public Prosecutor Kocevski, the head of the Skopje Public Prosecutor’s Office, Gavril Bubevski, the Council of Public Prosecutors, and Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski.
In the letter, they stated that they were being harassed at work by their superior, Hajrullahi. They included accounts of unprofessional conduct, citing specific offensive remarks directed at them.
“If you are unable to protect us, and in light of the threats made by him, it would be better not to take any action regarding our allegations, so as not to cause us additional harm,” the five employees wrote to State Public Prosecutor Kocevski.
The letters prompted no visible institutional response. In the months that followed, Hajrullahi filed civil lawsuits against the five employees, accusing them of defamation and insult. He sought €10,000 in damages from each of them.
“The employees were instructed by at least one prosecutor to damage my honor and reputation,” stated Hajrullahi at the Civil Court in Skopje.
At the same time, he became a frequent guest on podcasts, television programs, and media outlets, including Plusinfo, Radio Lider, The Late Night Evening Show with Bogdan Ilievski, and Kanal 5. There, he advanced the claim that he was the target of a campaign because of a dispute with State Public Prosecutor Kocevski over the case known as “The SPO Bonuses.”
In that case, the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime dismissed a criminal complaint filed by VMRO-DPMNE against former Special Prosecutor’s Office (SPO) prosecutors concerning additional income they had received while serving in that institution.
“Their actions are like those of a mafia organization. If those ten people are removed, the Public Prosecutor’s Office will function properly,” Hajrullahi said publicly about his former SPO colleagues.
While Hajrullahi maintained an active media presence, an oversight review was underway inside the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office he was leading at the time — ordered by State Public Prosecutor Ljupco Kocevski.
The initial indications of potential irregularities, according to sources familiar with the process, stemmed from the testimonies of the five employees.
Indictments, Suspensions, Resignation — Justice Still Pending
After hearing the testimonies detailing alleged irregularities, IRL turned to the most critical task: securing official confirmation.
Allegations alone were not enough. What was needed was documentary evidence.
At the center of that search was the internal oversight report conducted at the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office. The document was not publicly accessible.
For months, the investigation appeared to stall. Without access to the report, the allegations remained claims without institutional verification. Then, several months later — just as avenues seemed exhausted — a whistleblower approached us and offered assistance.
What followed altered the trajectory of the investigation.
Through this source, we gained access to details that suggested events inside the Prosecutor’s Office were far more serious than initially understood. Practices that, until then, had seemed improbable within such an institution were described in formal documentation.
We obtained what investigators often call the “crown evidence”: the oversight report from the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office. Its contents were analyzed in a separate, detailed report by IRL. The findings confirmed key elements of the testimonies provided by our sources — including irregularities in the allocation of cases.
In the meantime, the oversight report became part of a formal indictment filed against Mustafa Hajrullahi and his deputy, Cvetanovski. They were charged with abuse of official position and authority — specifically, for manipulating case assignments.
To avoid a conflict of interest, the case was transferred to the Prosecutor’s Office in Shtip, given that the accused are prosecutors operating within the Skopje jurisdiction.
The competent prosecutor handling the case in Shtip is Tatjana Kacarova.
However, the threats continued — this time directed not at the staff of the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office, but at Prosecutor Kacarova. The method remained the same: anonymous late-night phone calls or “well-intentioned” messages delivered through intermediaries. The aim, she says, was clear — to force the dismissal of the criminal complaint for workplace harassment.
“The threats and pressures were veiled and carried out with calculated intimidation, through my children… I have worked in the prosecution service for 20 years, and nothing like this has ever happened to me,” Kacarova told IRL.
The indictments in Shtip were filed in August 2025. However, following objections by Hajrullahi, the Court in Shtip has yet to decide whether to confirm the charges and proceed to trial or to dismiss them.
Previously, Hajrullahi and Cvetanovski had been suspended from their positions at the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office pending the outcome of the investigation.
Since the beginning of this year, Hajrullahi has been practicing as a lawyer.
State Prosecutor Ljupcho Kocevski also stepped down. He submitted his resignation on 16 December 2025 after the government decided to remove him from office.
