By Goran Lefkov

Jovan Jovcevski is a unique example of a whistleblower in the Balkans and Europe. He was a the administrative founder of the Operational Technical Agency (OTA), a public agency in North Macedonia that works to prevent abusive electronic surveillance of citizens. Jovcevski was responsible for legal wiretapping and receiving whistleblower complaints. When he started reporting misconduct, the OTA’s director immediately targeted him. Some of the companies he was monitoring ended up on the US blacklist.

After Zoran Angelovski was appointed the OTA’s general director, Jovcevski received the first reports of misconduct with the institution. After registering several reports, the problems began. Retaliation against him was organized by high-ranking officials of the former ruling party, Social Democratic Union of Macedonia.

Jovcevski said he received four whistleblower reports in January 2016, including about threats by Angelovski against an employee, “selling” jobs at in OTA for €10,000, and a request for 10 percent bribe for purchasing equipment estimated to cost €8-10 million.

Jovcevski said Angelovskiasked him to hide the reports, which he did not agree to do. But the alleged illegalities at OTA do not stop there. In 2019 he learned that OTA director Angelovski began cooperating with Ivo Malinkovski, a well-known figure in the spyware technology field. Malinkovski owns Cytrox, a company that four years later ended up on the US blacklist of sanctioned companies.

Jovcevski explains that an extremely sensitive, “illegal” type of equipment known as Pegasus was produced in Macedonia in 2016-18. Only countries are authorized to purchase such equipment. However, a former Israeli army intelligence officer named Tal Dilian became involved with a deal on a “private basis” and sold Pagasus to countries “with dishonest intentions,” says Jovcevski. It also was sold to Cytrox. In July 2023 Cytrox, along with Intelexa and its subsidiary in Greece, ended up on the US blacklist.

Cytrox, OTA and Tal Dilian in Action

While Angelovski dismissed Jovcevski’s corruption allegations, intensive work was being done in the background to set up the illegal wiretapping software for Dilian. Jovcevski said Angelovski had intensive contacts with Cytrox and Malinkovski in 2021, and together with current OTA director Marija Janichevska met several times with the Greek intelligence agency in 2022. Angelovski calls the meetings inappropriate and “nonsense.”

The information first was published by an investigative NGO Citizen Lab in Toronto in 2021, which indicated that illegal spyware was being produced in Macedonia. At the same time, one year after Jovcevski was fired, Facebook owner Meta investigated seven companies and prohibited them from accessing their data on Facebook, accusing them of illegal data collection of citizens, including Malinkovski’s Cytrox in Macedonia.

In mid-2022, a scandal shook Greece as well. Greece’s intelligence agency was found to be using the Predator software to track journalists. The agency’s head was fired and an investigation was opened.

Immediately after, the US put Dilian’s companies Intelexa and Cytrox on the US blacklist. In North Macedonia, the situation took on a new dimension. The new government under Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski and the VMRO-DPMNE party appointed Marija Janichevska as OTA’s director, who is directly involved in procuring that software.

Several requests have been made to OTA and State Commission for Prevention of Corruption to explain the Jovcevski case, but no response has been forthcoming.

The EU began its own investigation in 2022. In Greece, a parliamentary commission was opened and the director of the Greek spy agency resigned. Israel also has begun an investigation.

Procedural Labyrinth

After discovering potential corruption, Jovcevski became enemy #1 for the authorities. They organized several traps to destroy his reputation as an employee and remove him from his job. He said he was disciplined four times and dismissed twice. “Because I was also a union representative, the union protected me and didn’t give permission for my dismissal. The third time, the director fired me without seeking the consent of the union,” Jovcevski said.

Jovcevski reported the director of OTA and other officials who pressured him to the State Commission for Prevention of Corruption (SCPC) and other public institutions. “I had official contacts with the Public Prosecutor’s Office, with the court and with the SCPC,” he says. “I pointed out that the developments in OTA are serious. There is a terrible abuse of power. But unfortunately, the SCPC looks like it is completely politicized.”

At a public conference on whistleblower protection in Skopje in 2022, two SCPC representatives claimed they did not know anything about Jovchevski’s case, although he documented his correspondence with the agency.

Regarding the case of procurement of the Predator software, it is very symptomatic that the case has been prosecuted internationally, but North Macedonian prosecutors has not initiated any criminal proceedings.

Jovcevski continues to fight his dismissal in court. “The courts do not value the whistleblower protection law nor the law on classified information.” He has appealed the verdicts against him in North Macedonia to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. “The first stage has passed. I expect that during this year it will enter the second phase,” says Jovcevski.

Institutions Do Not Protect Whistleblowers

North Macedonian institutions have not provided whistleblowers even with basic protection. This is the conclusion of several cases that have been analyzed in recent years.

“I don’t see that anyone in society is seriously thinking about how to help whistleblowers, says Gjorgi Lazarevski, who became a national hero when his revelations of illegal wiretapping led to the downfall of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski in 2016. “Here we have so many officials (who are receiving) so many (whistleblower) reports. But we have but no results.”

“I also wonder about the State Commission for the Prevention of Corruption,” observes Lazarevski. “It is highly paid and appreciated organization, which has nice working conditions. And when you see the statistics, based on their conclusions, the number of court cases that have been opened is minimal, and the number of institutions that have been convicted of a crime is even smaller. In that sense, I think we are far from a situation that we can be satisfied with, and we are even further from a situation where a whistleblower will appear.”

The SCPC’s statistics on whistleblowing speak for public institutions’ lack of interest in developing a well-functioning whistleblowing system. According to the agency’s 2023 annual report, only 207 of 1,324 public institutions in the country have appointed an authorized person to deal with whistleblower reports. And only 133 have submitted to SCPC mandatory semiannual reports whistleblower reports within their institutions.