Both advisor and court employee – attends his boss’s hearing

Goran Stamenkovski, advisor to Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, who is also an employee of the Criminal Court, sat on the back bench meant for public audience on Thursday and watched Zaev’s testimony about the mass wiretapping.
Stamenkovski is head of the Human Resources department at the Criminal Court and reporters can often spot him at some of the hearings. He attended the trial in the “Bribery” case in which Zaev was acquitted, he appeared as part of the public when the verdict was pronounced for the former head of the Counter-Intelligence Agency UBK, Sasho Mijalkov, in the “Titanic 2” case, and he recently was spotted attending the hearing of the prime minister in the “Target-Fortress” case.
Although as head of the sector whose job involves managing the Criminal Court staff, both Stamenkovski and Criminal President Ivan Dzolev argue that as a court employee he has the right to attend any hearing.
To the paper’s question – in which capacity Stamenkovski attended the hearing in which the Prime Minister testified -he replied that he was there as a court employee, as head of the human resources department.
“As a court employee, as head of the human resources department. Court employees have the right to attend a hearing when it is open to the public, and associates and volunteers also attend hearings. It is not a problem”, Stamenkovski said in a statement for Nezavisen Vesnik/Independent Daily..
According to him, there is no conflict of interest in his presence at the trial in the audience as he has advised the prime minister on social policy.
“A social policy adviser is not related to the judiciary, I have nothing to do with the judiciary, no one has asked me about the court or anything related to the court,” Stamenkovski told Nezavisen Vesnik. On our question assessing which trials the prime minister’s adviser should attend, they said they attend trials that they think should attend, and were public and when there were no political trials.
But neither he nor the President of the Court responded to whether the hearings were in Stamenkovski’s job description.
“As a court employee he is allowed to attend hearings, and not just him, everyone else allowed to attend. The audience is for everyone. Often, experts and other employees attend trials”, Dzolev told Nezavisen Vesnik/Independent Daily.
Stamenkovski is on the list of external associates with a monthly fee of 30,000 denars.
Prime Minister Zaev has made a comment on his connection with Stamenkovski when he was tried in the “Bribery” case and said he was an administrative person in the Court and has no decisive position, as he is neither a judge nor a jury. His announcements that Stamenkovski intends to leave his position at the court.
“Mr. Stamenkovski, according to his education in social politics, intends to leave the court, so he was hired as an adviser. I believe that he will one day work in his profession, he is not a person making decisions here, he is an administrative person, which I met during the Colorful Revolution, on the streets”, said Zaev.
After the acquittal for “Bribery”, Prime Minister Zaev appeared in court last week as a witness to a key case of the Special Public Prosecutor’s Office, the “Target-Fortress”, or the UBK mass wiretapping, which he unveiled.
However, in his testimony he never mentioned Mijalkov as responsible for the wiretapping, and former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski was at the top of this organization that wiretapped about 20,000 citizens. In a statement to the media, Zaev said that Mijalkov was guilty, but that all evil came from Gruevski. The former prime minister is not even charged in this case.
Goran Stamenkovski filed charges for harassment in the workplace against former Criminal Court President Vladimir Panchevski and won the lawsuit that he filed after being dismissed for attending protests of the Colorful Revolution. (FFS)