The US ambassador to Skopje, Angela Agler, said that North Macedonia is facing an “epidemic of corruption”, while expressing the US’s displeasure with all the governments of the Balkan country for their inability to deal with this situation.

The US ambassador in Skopje, in a briefing to journalists, noted that over the past 32 years, as long as the United States and North Macedonia have had interstate relations, American taxpayers have invested half a billion dollars in reforms for the judicial system and the functioning of the state of law in North Macedonia, but, as he said, the results are meager.

Just last week, the US blacklisted North Macedonia’s former deputy prime minister and one of the country’s best-known businessmen, Koco Angiusef, for his involvement in corruption cases during his tenure as deputy prime minister ( 2017-2019).

Angela Agler said that “the US is 100% sure that Kocho Angiusef is corrupt” and added that there is a wealth of evidence against him.

However, the former Prime Minister of North Macedonia, Zoran Zaev, in whose government the former had served as vice-president, stood by Koco Angiusev’s side. Zaev called the US decision to blacklist Kocho Angiushev “baseless”, for whom he said that as the vice-president of his government he worked with great dedication and complete transparency.

Last month, the US blacklisted two other prominent North Macedonian businessmen linked to corruption cases under Nikola Gruevski, who is also on the US blacklist and has fled to Hungary, where he was granted political asylum by his political ally, the country’s prime minister Viktor Orbán.