Macedonia's Ousted PM Awaits Four Trial Verdicts

The recent two-year sentence handed down to Nikola Gruevski Macedonia's former conservative Prime Minister and ex-leader of the right-wing VMRO DPMNE party - for involvement in the illicit secret purchase of a luxury Mercedes - is not the end of his judicial troubles.

Gruevski currently faces criminal charges in four more cases, three of which have already gone to trial.

Apart from the Mercedes case, codenamed 'Tank', the Special Prosecution, SJO - in charge of investigating allegations of high-level crime - also indicted Gruevski in the cases codenamed 'Titanic", 'TNT", 'Traektorija' ('Trajectory') and 'Shamari' ('Slapping').

In all of these cases, Gruevski's defence insists he is innocent. Gruevski has repeated on many occasions that he sees the trials as politically motivated by the current Social Democrats-led government.

In the first case, codenamed 'Titanic', seen by judicial experts as the most complex, the SJO indicted Gruevski and other top-ranking VMRO DPMNE officials for allegedly masterminding electoral fraud in 2013.

In this case, Gruevski is charged on three counts: criminal association, for which he is faces a jail sentence from one to five years; misuse of assets during an election campaign, for which the lowest sentence is five years, and violation of the freedom of voters, for which the minimum jail sentence is three years.

In the second case, codenamed 'TNT', the SJO has indicted Gruevski for misuse of office, for which the maximum sentence is three years in jail.

In this case, he is suspected of ordering the demolition of a building that was being constructed by his former political ally, Fijat Canovski, as an act of political retaliation after Canovski's small party, the...