Former Prime Minister of Northern Macedonia, Nikola Gruevski has been sentenced by a Skopje court to seven years in prison.

Gruevski is accused of embezzling 1.3m euros from the party he led to buy land for construction. He fled to Hungary in November 2018 to avoid serving a two-year prison sentence in a second trial and was immediately granted political asylum in Budapest.

The court confiscated Gruevski’s property. These are apartments and plots in Vodno. The confiscation includes three luxury apartments in “Panorama Residence”, as well as two apartments on Bihaqka Street.

The properties owned by Gruevski’s mother were excluded from the confiscation. Prosecutor Lile Stefanova said that according to the market value, the confiscated property of all convicts is worth about 3 million euros.

“I assess that the Prosecution in this case provided and disclosed qualitative evidence from which the enacting clause of the indictment was fully proved”, said Lile Stefanova, Prosecutor.