Grubi offers three apartments as guarantee worth €330,000 to get passport back
Court waits prosecution opinion before deciding whether the ex-deputy prime minister can travel abroad; house arrest by law ends on the 13th.
Three apartments owned by Grubi and members of his family have been offered as collateral worth €330,000 so the former deputy prime minister can have his passport returned, the court heard on Tuesday. The Criminal Court is awaiting the prosecution's opinion before deciding whether he may travel abroad.
Under the current measure, Grubi is on house arrest, which by law expires on the 13th. "I cannot answer why he needs the passport. Every citizen needs a passport for free movement. The guarantee is, by the way, a stronger measure than the precautionary measure of confiscating a travel document. By force of law, his house arrest expires on the 13th. It is a legitimate right of the accused, through the defence which submitted such a request," said Goce Ristevski, lawyer for Grubi.
Legal limits and the timetable
For the offence he is charged with, house arrest can last a maximum of two months. That statutory limit expires next week.
In court Grubi questioned witness Aleksandar Andonov from the State Lottery, who was a member of the commission that carried out the public procurement of the VLT (video lottery terminal) machines. One of Grubi's questions suggested the procurement procedure had begun earlier and that documents were reviewed four months earlier, at a time when Grubi was not chairing the government session. Andonov replied he was not aware of what happened in government.
Andonov described the procurement process in detail and said the VLT machines remain in the State Lottery warehouses and have not been put into use. He added that requests were forwarded from the competent sector to the Public Revenue Office and the Ministry of Finance to obtain appropriate decisions, but he could not say what decisions were made or why the machines were not deployed.
Andonov was the prosecution's second witness and the defence raised no objections to his testimony. The prosecution's first witness, a former director at the Lottery, was declared an unreliable witness during trial because his statements in court differed from his earlier investigative testimony. Prosecutors said they will provide statements on this and other issues at the next hearing.
Photo: Stefan Didam - Schmallenberg / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
