# Zoran Stavreski

# Zoran Stavreski

Zoran Stavreski (Macedonian: Зоран Ставрески; born 29 October 1964 in Ohrid) is an economist and politician from North Macedonia. He held the economic portfolio in the governments of Nikola Gruevski and [VMRO-DPMNE](/organizations/vmro-dpmne) from 2006, including as a minister without portfolio for the economy, and from July 2009 until 14 June 2016 he was minister of finance while remaining deputy prime minister.

He graduated from the Faculty of Economics at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje in 1987 and took a master's degree there in 1997 on the choice of a monetary strategy for Macedonia. From 1993 to 2000 he worked at the National Bank, as a researcher and then, from 1997, as director of its research directorate, and he sat on the bank's teams in talks with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group. Between January 2000 and March 2001 he was an undersecretary in the [Ministry of Finance](/organizations/ministry-of-finance). From 2001 to 2006 he worked at the [World Bank](/organizations/world-bank), including as an adviser to an executive director in the Dutch constituency and, in 2006, as a lead economist on development policy; with Stefan Koeberle and Jan Walliser he edited the Bank's 2006 volume *Budget Support as More Effective Aid?*.

As finance minister he managed budgets through the aftermath of the global financial crisis, a period in which public investment and activity in the technological industrial development zones supported growth. The IMF's 2015 Article IV consultation recorded that public-sector debt had nearly doubled since 2008, to 43.3 percent of GDP in 2014, and that the fiscal deficit had widened to 4.2 percent of GDP that year; the Fund's executive directors pressed for further consolidation. In March 2015 the opposition published wiretaps in which a voice attributed to Stavreski called Gruevski's spending "insane"; Stavreski called the recordings selective and illegally obtained, and he did not deny that the conversations had taken place.

On 14 June 2016 he resigned both offices, writing that doctors had advised prolonged treatment and recuperation, and in the same letter he credited the government with lower unemployment, a better business climate and stronger growth and exports. On 29 January 2025 the office of Prime Minister [Hristijan Mickoski](/people/hristijan-mickoski) published a list of 17 external advisers that named Stavreski as adviser on financing and banking.

## Early life and education

### Ohrid and schooling

Zoran Stavreski was born in Ohrid, then a town in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, a constituent republic of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. A biographical profile posted by the fact-checking site Vistinomer on 23 June 2016 gives the date as 29 October 1964. No published civil extract is cited for that day. A portrait that the investigative outlet Prizma ran on 16 March 2015 described him, in parentheses, as 51; a person born on 29 October 1964 would still have been 50.

Published accounts name neither a primary nor a secondary school. The Prizma portrait records that he is married and the father of one daughter.

### University and graduate work

Vistinomer states that he graduated in 1987 as an economist (*дипломиран економист*) from the Faculty of Economics at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje. The faculty was established by a regulation of the government of the People’s Republic of Macedonia adopted on 14 November 1950, as the fifth faculty of the university. No public source records a specialization, grades, or an undergraduate thesis. The decade before the master’s degree was the breakup of the Yugoslav monetary system and the introduction of a separate currency.

An August 1992 World Bank mission report described the break in which that second degree was prepared. It estimated that output had fallen by about 8 percent in 1990 and 13 percent in 1991, put unemployment near a quarter of the labor force, and traced a rise in consumer prices of more than 200 percent in 1991 to monetization of the federal budget deficit. In January–April 1992, it wrote, more than 10 billion Yugoslav dinars flowed into the republic, four-month inflation reached 380 percent against 230 percent for all of 1991, and the black-market premium on foreign exchange was nearly 300 percent. On 26 April 1992 the National Bank of Macedonia was set up as an independent central bank responsible for a new currency, the denar. Cash of up to 50,000 dinars could be exchanged at par over three days; the rest became deposits frozen for a month.

The program paired currency reform and tighter monetary and fiscal policy with a wage freeze, controls on a short list of “strategic” prices, and a rate of 360 denars per Deutsche Mark. A government team designed it with experts from the university’s economics department. Monthly inflation fell from 86 percent in April 1992 to 70 percent in May and 17 percent in June, still above targets of 45 and 8 percent. The report does not place Stavreski on that team. Vistinomer puts him in the National Bank’s research directorate from 1993 until the thesis was finished.

The thesis took the regime choice as its subject. Prizma and Vistinomer give the 1997 master’s title, at the same faculty, as “Choice of an optimal monetary strategy and instruments — the case of the Republic of Macedonia” (*Избор на оптимална монетарна стратегија и инструменти – случајот на Република Македонија*). Ljupka Georgievska’s 2013 doctoral dissertation at the faculty, *Methods for Monetary Policy Evaluation and the Case of the Republic of Macedonia*, cites it as a 1997 National Bank volume in the series of master’s and doctoral works, under the longer title “Choice of an optimal monetary strategy and instruments for the monetary regulation of the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia.” She writes that the bank targeted monetary growth, with M1 as the intermediate target, from April 1992 through the third quarter of 1995, then in October 1995 switched to an exchange-rate target, anchoring the denar to the mark and, from January 2002, to the euro. She points to his study for the argument that monetary targeting slowed money growth and brought down the high inflation of those years, and to other research for the weakness of an unstable demand for money. The thesis text is not on the public web; its place in the literature rests on that later citation.

## Work at the National Bank and the Ministry of Finance

### Research directorate

From 1990 to 1993 Stavreski was a commercialist in the import-and-export department of AD Automakedonija in Skopje, according to a 2016 biographical dossier by the fact-checking project Truthmeter (Vistinomer). A Prizma profile treats that firm as his first employer and the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia—later renamed the National Bank of the Republic of North Macedonia—as the next. Truthmeter lists him as a researcher in the bank's Research Directorate from 1993 to 1997 and as its director from 1997 to 2000: in the first post, a member of the bank's operational team for talks with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and in the second a member of the bank's negotiating team with the same institutions. Prizma summarizes the years as researcher and then director. A 2016 Faktor dossier instead calls him an adviser and head of the research office, while agreeing that he worked at the bank from 1993 to 2000.

The directorate worked inside a monetary system still being built after independence. A 2016 paper by economists at Goce Delchev University in Štip records inflation of about 1,925 percent in 1992 and treats disinflation, with monetary independence, as the first macroeconomic task. From 1995, it says, policy targeted the denar: the law still called the regime flexible, but the rate was treated as a fixed nominal anchor, near 27 to the Deutsche mark until mid-1997 and near 31 afterward, with convertibility declared in June 1998. In November 2000 the IMF still described a de facto peg to the mark, and by then to the euro, maintained with indirect instruments.

His published work tracked the same questions. Truthmeter records a 1997 master's degree from the Faculty of Economics at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje on the choice of an optimal monetary strategy and instruments for Macedonia. In June 1998 the bank issued two working papers in his name, noting the master's degree. *Currency in Circulation* (Working Paper No. 1) finds cash an unusually large share of narrow money, against both developed and other transition economies, and recommends non-cash payments, tighter limits on firms' cash use, and fewer cash wages and pensions. *Interest Rate Policy in the Republic of Macedonia* (Working Paper No. 3) attributes high bank rates to low saving, rigid credit demand, risk premia, and high costs, and lists tax, supervisory, and legal steps that might lower them without dropping market pricing.

### Undersecretary and negotiations with the IMF

Truthmeter dates the next post—undersecretary (*potsekretar*) at the Ministry of Finance, and member of the government's IMF negotiating team—from January 2000 to March 2001. Faktor describes a shorter appointment in 2001 in the ministry then headed by Nikola Gruevski, and places it after VMRO-DPMNE entered government in 1998, when the same profile says Stavreski began working closely with Gruevski. The ministry job ended with his move to the World Bank.

On 29 November 2000 the IMF Executive Board approved a three-year Extended Fund Facility loan of SDR 24.1 million (about US$31 million) and, in principle, a three-year Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility loan of SDR 10.3 million (about US$13 million), the latter pending a World Bank discussion of an interim poverty strategy. Acting chairman Shigemitsu Sugisaki said the program sought growth with financial stability: lower direct taxes, administrative reform, sale or closure of large loss-makers, and stricter bank supervision, carrying forward the previous Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility. The Fund also noted a one-time price rise in April 2000 from a new value-added tax, reserves of about US$595 million by end-September, and 2001 plans for labor-tax cuts after a fiscal surplus in 2000. The biographies put Stavreski on the government side of the talks; they do not name him as a signatory of the authorities' request.

## World Bank years

Zoran Stavreski worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., from 2001 until August 2006, when he left to join the government of Nikola Gruevski in the Republic of Macedonia, now North Macedonia. On 17 August 2006, with parliament expected to confirm that cabinet on 25 August, a U.S. embassy cable called him a senior economist at the Bank. A 2008 embassy biography described 2001–2006 as “various positions” there, after a short 2001 spell as a Ministry of Finance undersecretary. The 2006 Bank book he co-edited lists the grade it uses for him: senior economist in Operations Policy and Country Services.

### Dutch constituency

Member countries share an executive director in multi-country constituencies. On 30 September 2002 the Dutch daily *Reformatorisch Dagblad*, citing the ANP news agency, reported that the Dutch executive director represented, besides the Netherlands, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Georgia, Israel, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Romania. Pieter Stek held that post from 1996 until 1 November 2002. The same report said Ad Melkert, a former Dutch Labour Party leader, had been accepted at the 2002 annual meetings as Stek’s successor, initially for two years. The annual report for the year ended 30 June 2004 still listed Melkert among the executive directors. The Netherlands-chaired office, now EDS19, represents that group plus Montenegro, with Macedonia named as North Macedonia.

A profile on the Macedonian site Vistinomer says that from 2001 to 2004 he was an advisor to that executive director for Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that he also advised World Bank and International Finance Corporation teams covering 25 Francophone African countries. Prizma’s 2015 sketch is shorter: advisor in the Dutch constituency, then consultant, then development-policy economist, with a return to Macedonia in 2006. The 2006 book records only the later Operations Policy and Country Services post and does not mention Africa.

### Europe and Central Asia and operational policy

The Vistinomer chronology, which is not laid out in a Bank personnel record, places him from March to August 2005 as a consultant in the Europe and Central Asia department’s poverty-reduction and economic-management unit, researching public expenditure in Southeast Europe: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania. It then lists an Operational Policy and Country Services consultancy from September 2005 and, from February to August 2006, what it calls a post as leading economist for development policies, including work on a budget-support book. The Bank’s March 2006 contributor list, and the U.S. embassy that August, both use “senior economist.”

With Stefan Koeberle and Jan Walliser he edited *Budget Support as More Effective Aid? Recent Experiences and Emerging Lessons* (World Bank, 2006; ISBN 978-0-8213-6463-5). The March 2006 preface says most chapters were discussed at a practitioners’ forum on budget support in Cape Town in May 2005, with further material from a workshop that month of the Strategic Partnership with Africa’s Budget Support Working Group, and that the editors were not imposing a single view. James Adams, vice president heading the Operations Policy and Country Services network, wrote the foreword. The contributor list gives Koeberle as director for Latin America and the Caribbean and Walliser, like Stavreski, as a senior economist in the same department.

Stavreski and Koeberle wrote the opening chapter, “Budget Support: Concept and Issues.” They defined budget support as finance for a medium-term program, paid regularly into a recipient’s budget and spent through that country’s own financial-management and budget systems. They set it against selectivity for stronger performers, country ownership, programmatic rather than short-term conditionality, and pressure for predictable aid around the Millennium Development Goals and the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. The chapter treated the instrument as most suitable where ownership, institutions, and the capacity to allocate resources were relatively strong, and said sector programs or projects could fit better if a government was not addressing fiduciary weaknesses. It also noted limits: transaction-cost savings were hard to show, effects on poverty were indirect, and donors still differed on fiduciary standards. The authors wrote that the Bank had only recently named this financing development policy lending, typified for low-income countries by poverty reduction support credits linked to a poverty reduction strategy. The book says its findings do not necessarily reflect the views of the executive directors or the governments they represent.

## Deputy prime minister for economic affairs

### Appointment in 2006

After the July 2006 parliamentary elections in the Republic of Macedonia (now North Macedonia), Nikola Gruevski of VMRO-DPMNE announced a proposed coalition cabinet on 14 August. Late on 26 August the Assembly voted 68 to 22 to approve the government and its four-year programme; deputies of the [Democratic Union for Integration](/organizations/democratic-union-for-integration) and the Party for Democratic Prosperity boycotted the sitting. The government took office on 28 August. Stavreski entered it as deputy prime minister for economic affairs—later English accounts also say “for financial issues”—while Trajko Slaveski became minister of finance.

He did not arrive from a long run of party office. A U.S. embassy cable of 17 August, written before the vote, placed him on the VMRO-DPMNE slate and described him as then a senior economist at the World Bank in Washington, D.C.. It traced a career from the National Bank, which he joined in 1993 and where he became research director in 1997, to an undersecretaryship at the Ministry of Finance under Gruevski in 2000–2001. The cable called the proposed cabinet mostly young technocrats without extensive bureaucratic experience, and said some candidates were only loosely affiliated with VMRO-DPMNE; its comment nevertheless grouped Economic Affairs with posts Gruevski was filling with close associates. A 2015 BIRN profile reported that he was among the few who entered without a VMRO-DPMNE membership card and was later brought into party bodies.

### Economic coordination, IPA and the 2008 annual meetings

The deputy prime minister’s office sat beside the finance ministry rather than in its place. Stavreski co-signed the government’s letters of intent to the International Monetary Fund in April 2007 and February 2008 with Gruevski, Slaveski and the central-bank governor. The 2007 letter committed the cabinet to macroeconomic stability, a better business climate and lower taxes.

From January 2007 personal and corporate income tax were set at a flat 12 percent, with reinvested profits taxed at zero—the deduction capped that year at half the corporate base—and from January 2008 both rates fell to 10 percent. An IMF survey that April found corporate-tax receipts up despite the cuts, helped by higher reported profits; unemployment edging from 36 to 35 percent in 2007; and greenfield foreign direct investment rising from 1.2 percent of GDP in 2006 to a projected 4.1 percent in 2007. It warned that wider free-zone concessions might conflict with European Union rules and that the labour-tax wedge was still high. *Doing Business 2008*, covering reforms through June 2007, ranked the country fourth among that year’s reformers and moved its ease-of-doing-business rank from 96 to 75.

The February 2008 letter said four technological-industrial development zones were being established, with Skopje 1 developing as an automotive cluster, and that the zones law had been amended toward the EU acquis. The [European Commission](/organizations/european-commission)’s November 2008 progress report, assessing the economy rather than one minister, recorded growth of 4 percent in 2006, 5 percent in 2007 and 6 percent in the first half of 2008, unemployment of 33.8 percent by mid-2008, and foreign direct investment of 6.5 percent of GDP on an annualised basis, against 2.8 percent a year earlier. First-half 2008 inflows were about 10 percent of GDP, largely in banking, with some greenfield investment. It also recorded a current-account deficit near 13 percent of GDP by mid-2008 and a more expansionary fiscal plan. Only one of four planned zones was operational, and slow courts and weak administration still constrained investment.

The Law on Balanced Regional Development, adopted on 15 May 2007, made the deputy prime minister for economic affairs chair of the Council for Balanced Regional Development. A government decision of 11 September 2007, published on 14 September, formed the council with Stavreski named first. The 2009 revision of the National Programme for the Adoption of the Acquis—still describing him as deputy prime minister for economic affairs and Slaveski as finance minister—recorded his designation as strategic coordinator for the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance. Under Commission Regulation (EC) No 718/2007 that post coordinates the regional-development and human-resources components, drafts the strategic coherence framework and aligns sectoral strategies and programmes, under the national IPA coordinator and without running the projects. The same programme named Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Bocevski as national IPA coordinator and Slaveski as competent accrediting officer.

The country also took the rotating chair of the 2008 Annual Meetings of the Boards of Governors of the IMF and the World Bank Group. At the closing joint session on 22 October 2007 Stavreski, then alternate governor of the Bank, accepted the chairmanship for 2008 on the country’s behalf. On 13 October 2008, as chairman, he opened the joint annual discussion in Washington during the global financial crisis. The post was that year’s turn to chair the meetings, not a standing executive office in either institution.

He kept the deputy prime ministership when parliament, on 10 July 2009, approved a reshuffle in which he also became minister of finance. Vladimir Pesevski took a new deputy-prime-minister post for the economy.

## Minister of finance

### The 2009 appointment

On 8 July 2009, during the global downturn, Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski made the first reshuffle of the VMRO-DPMNE government he had led since 2006. Spokesman Martin Martinovski said Finance Minister Trajko Slaveski would leave and that Zoran Stavreski would take finance while remaining deputy prime minister; Vladimir Peshevski became deputy prime minister for the economy, and the education and agriculture ministers were also replaced. Parliament approved the changes late on 10 July. Slaveski was the only minister dismissed outright. Gruevski said the ministry needed more efficiency and coordination as the downturn hit Macedonia; Slaveski rejected that charge and urged an emergency cut of about €100 million because tax revenue was shrinking, and Stavreski said he would examine the claim at once. The [Social Democratic Union of Macedonia](/organizations/social-democratic-union-of-macedonia) called the reshuffle insufficient and Slaveski a scapegoat. No minister from the ethnic Albanian coalition partner, the Democratic Union for Integration, was changed.

Within days Stavreski said a third-quarter rebalancing was likely but that a drastic cut was not urgent, and would depend on July and August receipts. The ministry said tax revenue had fallen about 12 percent and that about 9 percent of the budget had already been cut. The government still projected growth near 1 percent; the International Monetary Fund then forecast a contraction of about 2 percent, after growth of more than 5 percent the year before. He kept the finance ministry and a deputy premiership until resigning both on 14 June 2016. A 2019 tally of finance ministers since independence ranked July 2009–June 2016 the longest tenure, at 2,534 days, ahead of Slaveski (August 2006–July 2009, 1,049 days) and Gruevski’s earlier term at the ministry (December 1999–November 2002, about 1,040 days).

### Budgets, the financial crisis and public debt

An IMF mission that met Stavreski in Skopje in October 2009 described the late-2008 shock as a collapse in export demand and external financing. To hold a 2009 deficit of 2.8 percent of GDP, the government limited spending increases and in July issued a €175 million Eurobond at 9.875 percent. Staff expected output to fall 1.3 percent and called the deficit appropriate. Central government gross debt was 21.3 percent of GDP in 2008 and projected at 24.5 percent for 2009. The 2010 target was 2.5 percent, with another freeze on public wages and hiring. Staff wanted medium-term deficits below 1.5 percent of GDP so the peg kept some fiscal room.

Deficits and debt then rose beyond that advice. In the IMF’s 2015 Article IV tables the central government balance was .4 percent of GDP in 2010, .5 percent in 2011, .8 percent in 2012, .9 percent in 2013 and .2 percent in 2014, with about .0 percent projected for 2015 against a 3.4 percent budget target. Gross general government debt in that series rose from 24.1 percent of GDP in 2010 to 38.1 percent in 2014. A broader public and publicly guaranteed measure, including the development bank, municipalities and non-financial public enterprises, rose from 26.4 to 43.5 percent; the Fund said public-sector debt had nearly doubled since 2008. Real GDP fell 0.5 percent in 2012, then grew 2.7 percent in 2013 and 3.8 percent in 2014. A World Bank Group review put public debt at 23.0 percent of GDP in 2008, 40.5 percent in 2013 and 46 percent gross in 2014 (40.8 percent net), still under a Southeast European average it gave as 52.6 percent. The European Commission recorded the same 46 percent at end-2014, up from 38.6 percent a year earlier once state-owned enterprises doing infrastructure work were included, and a 2014 budget deficit of 4.2 percent.

In May 2012, after a no-confidence vote, Stavreski defended a cut of about 5 percent in a budget near €2.7 billion and put public debt at 26.8 percent of GDP, against 38.4 percent in 2005. Social Democrat Igor Ivanovski said the 26.8 percent figure used an unrealistic growth assumption and that debt was at least 30 percent of GDP; colleague Marjanco Nikolov said it had roughly doubled since 2006. Balkan Insight reported about €460 million borrowed or arranged over six months, including a €250 million five-year [Deutsche Bank](/organizations/deutsche-bank) loan at 6.83 percent, while the 2012 growth forecast was cut from 4.5 to 2 percent.

The Commission traced the 2014 gap to a supplement that raised the deficit target from 3.4 to 3.6 percent of GDP, then to extra pensions, benefits, subsidies and the Corridor X motorway. A July 2015 supplement again set 3.6 percent, and the medium-term plan relaxed the 2017 goal from 2.6 to 2.9 percent. Investment was about 10 percent of the 2014 budget, against about 45 percent for social transfers. Debt-law changes that summer limited guarantees for state firms but encouraged their unguaranteed borrowing, which the Commission said made published debt less transparent. The IMF urged a deficit below 3 percent of GDP by 2017 and a debt brake near 50 percent beside a planned 60 percent ceiling. The World Bank treated roads as a main driver of the wider total: the state roads company was expected to borrow nearly €800 million abroad through 2018, about €575 million of it from China. In July 2014 the ministry sold €500 million of seven-year Eurobonds at a 4.25 percent yield for budget needs and maturing debt. The draft 2016 budget proposed €3.18 billion of spending and a deficit of 3.2 percent of GDP on assumed 4 percent growth; economist Abdulmenaf Bexheti called the increase pre-election spending.

### Taxes, investment promotion and criticism of spending

The World Bank described flat personal and corporate income taxes as lowered to 10 percent in 2009, from 12 and 15 percent, and tax on reinvested profits as abolished. Personal-income-tax revenue, already down from 2.5 percent of GDP in 2006 to 2.1 percent in 2008 when the progressive scale ended, stayed near 2.0–2.1 percent; corporate-income-tax revenue fell from 2.1 percent of GDP in 2008 to 1.1 percent in 2009. Planned taxes on deposit interest and on securities gains were postponed, the latter until 2016. In 2015 the IMF tied stronger profit-tax receipts partly to ending the exemption for profits that were not reinvested. Amendments to the value-added-tax law in force from January 2015, the Commission reported, created a legal basis for electronic invoices and improved the processing of refunds inside the legal deadline.

Investors in technological-industrial development zones received, the World Bank reported, ten years without corporate income tax, up to a full cut in personal income tax, and relief from value-added tax and customs duties on inputs and equipment. The same review noted Commission findings that the zones law still needed to match the EU code on business taxation. Foreign direct investment averaged 4.2 percent of GDP in 2006–14, below a regional 7.6 percent, in the World Bank review. The Commission put 2014 inflows at 3.3 percent of GDP, under a ten-year average of 4.3 percent. The IMF credited the zones and public works, with consumption, for 3.8 percent growth in 2014. On *Doing Business*, the World Bank review recorded a rise from 92nd in 2006 to 25th in 2013; an IMF note at the start of Stavreski’s tenure already had the country up from 69th to 32nd, so much of the climb predated the appointment.

Skopje 2014, announced in 2010 at about €80 million, stood near €560 million in a 2015 Balkan Investigative Reporting Network count, against an official 2013 figure of €207 million, and above €600 million by August. Critics cited the price, opaque contracts and the neo-baroque style. The Commission found that 2014 pensions, public wages and farm subsidies rose by more than the law required, and asked for regular publication of the government workforce and payroll. The World Bank put the general-government wage bill at about 7.5 percent of GDP in 2013, below a regional average of 8.7 percent, but said no public employee headcount existed; it also noted planned rises of 4 percent in public salaries from November 2014 and 5 percent in pensions from March 2014, above legal indexation. The IMF judged that low taxes had drawn investment but that contribution rates were among the region’s lowest, transfers stayed generous, and the fiscal room built before 2008 had largely been used up.

## Surveillance scandal and criminal inquiries

### The 2015 wiretap releases

In February 2015 [Zoran Zaev](/people/zoran-zaev), leader of the opposition Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, began publishing batches of recorded telephone calls, popularly called “bombs,” which he said came from inside the intelligence service of what was then the Republic of Macedonia (now North Macedonia). On 9 February in Skopje the party alleged that more than 20,000 people had been illegally wiretapped. Zaev attributed the surveillance to Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and Sašo Mijalkov, head of the Administration for Security and Counterintelligence. Gruevski denied that his government had ordered it and blamed an unnamed foreign service working with Zaev; Zaev said the material came from inside the domestic service.

On 2 March Zaev released a sixth set, presented as talks between Finance Minister Zoran Stavreski and Interior Minister [Gordana Jankuloska](/people/gordana-jankuloska) during the 2012 budget rebalance and the 2013 projections. He said they showed “chaos in the budget.” In passages attributed to Stavreski, the speaker says “Budget revenues are a disaster,” accuses Gruevski of “megalomaniac requests,” and adds, “I am no magician.” On culture spending and the Skopje 2014 reconstruction, the same voice calls it “a tragedy” that five percent of the budget went to culture and says to stop “constructing buildings and monuments.” Balkan Insight printed a further line: “We are lunatics! We are spending on chocolate when we don’t have bread.” The voice attributed to Stavreski also describes Gruevski as a man “who has lost the sense of reality.” He is also reported saying that ministers were about to sign, without a tender, a Chinese motorway contract he called illegal; the Sinohydro deal, worth more than half a billion euros, was later signed.

Stavreski did not deny that those recordings were genuine. He said they had been “spiced up a little… to insert discord… and disagreement within the government’s economic team,” called them “selective,” and said tapes in which he and Gruevski agreed had not been published. He described the material as “obtained, created and owned illegally.”

Other releases attributed in part to him concerned criminal complaints and property. Audio published on 15 February has Jankuloska telling Stavreski that she asked public prosecutor Marko Zvrlevski—not by saying “reject the charges,” but by telling him to “see to it that the matter is done”—to deal with a complaint against Stavreski, and that Zvrlevski later said “the task you gave me is done.” Stavreski calls that “great news.” A set presented on 31 May was reported as a talk in which Jankuloska and her husband had bought two apartments, which an opposition spokesman said was Stavreski’s idea, and in which Stavreski discusses a flat at 20 Dimche Mirchev Street, where many VMRO-DPMNE officials already owned units. As summarized from the tape, he worried about being seen and about declaring the purchase to the anti-corruption commission; Jankuloska said she had not yet registered her own two flats.

The publications were the setting for European Union mediation. On 15 July 2015 Enlargement Commissioner [Johannes Hahn](/people/johannes-hahn) and three members of the [European Parliament](/organizations/european-parliament) welcomed a four-party agreement, building on an accord of 2 June, providing for early elections and “a special prosecutor to investigate the issues surrounding or arising from the interception of communications.” The Special Public Prosecutor’s Office (SJO) under Katica Janeva had five years to investigate the wiretaps but only 18 months, a limit inserted at VMRO-DPMNE’s insistence, in which to file charges. That period ended on 30 June 2017 and was not extended. In January 2019 the Supreme Court held that after those 18 months the SJO could no longer open investigations or file charges. Janeva was later convicted in the separate “Extortion” case and by 2022 was reported to be serving seven years. A law in force from 1 July 2020 abolished the SJO and moved its unfinished files to the ordinary prosecution. Stavreski left the finance ministry in June 2016; that resignation is covered separately.

### The Podarok case and related probes

On 10 October 2018 the SJO said it had opened six investigations involving suspected budget damage of nearly €80 million. The first, “Podarok” (“Gift”), named Stavreski, former transport minister Mile Janakieski and Krste Miladinov, director of the state company Macedonian Energy Resources. Prosecutors said that from January 2012 to July 2014 they abused their office and obtained an unlawful benefit of 2,008,877,000 denars—close to €33 million—for the Moscow firm OAO Stroytransgaz, with the same loss to the budget.

In that account, Stavreski and Janakieski represented Macedonia under an agreement signed in St. Petersburg on 19 June 2010 to settle Macedonia’s $60,560,242 share of the former Soviet Union’s debt to the former Yugoslavia. They agreed, prosecutors said, to close the sum by building the Klečovce–Block Station 5 gas-pipeline section for $75,700,303 (€55,647,292), with Russia paying 80 percent and Macedonia 20 percent. A ministry study for a Klečovce–Štip section, described as nearly 36 kilometres longer, had estimated €30–35 million. The SJO said the suspects knew that figure, that the government accepted the offer in a closed session, and that parliament passed a pipeline law in shortened procedure without showing MPs the study. Miladinov signed the contract in Skopje on 9 July 2014. The office’s summary was that Macedonia effectively paid for the pipeline itself, while Russia’s debt “remained a ‘gift’ for Russia.” These were allegations. No conviction of Stavreski in the case has been reported.

The file was opened after the June 2017 deadline the Supreme Court later said barred new SJO investigations. After the office closed, former SJO prosecutor Gavril Bubevski, by then head of the Skopje prosecution, was reported still leading it in 2022. A request for legal assistance to Russia had gone unanswered. For investigations opened after 2017, wiretaps could be used only as indications, not as court evidence; the file was said to hold one Stavreski–Janakieski recording about the contract, subject to that limit. A June 2022 report said Stavreski had been seen once, in 2019, questioned at the financial police about the pipeline. An October account said only Miladinov had been formally summoned, and that a sighting of Stavreski there was not confirmed as concerning “Podarok.” No indictment had been filed. Of the former SJO’s cases, he was described as a suspect only in this one.

## Resignation

### The June 2016 letter

On 14 June 2016 Zoran Stavreski submitted a written resignation as deputy prime minister responsible for economic affairs and as minister of finance of the Republic of Macedonia (now North Macedonia). He wrote that the health problems he faced, and doctors’ advice, made prolonged treatment and recovery necessary and would leave him unable to perform either post. He did not name a diagnosis.

The letter framed the exit as the close of a long spell in VMRO-DPMNE governments. Stavreski had been a deputy prime minister since the party took office in 2006 and finance minister since 2009, including nine years beside Nikola Gruevski. He thanked Gruevski for what he called excellent cooperation and support, and wrote that with him and other ministers he had produced economic results “never seen before,” which he said leading international financial institutions had recognized. He also thanked prime minister [Emil Dimitriev](/people/emil-dimitriev) and the rest of the cabinet for cooperation in what he called a deep political crisis, and referred to the private sector, the National Bank and international institutions.

As the team’s record he listed a serious fall in unemployment, a better business climate, high growth of the economy and of exports, many new investors, and what he called sound macroeconomic and financial policies, achieved, he said, through the global financial crisis, the European debt crisis and nearly two years of domestic political crisis. Those were his claims. [Deutsche Welle](/organizations/deutsche-welle) the same day set them against a rise in public debt from 26.3 percent of gross domestic product when he became finance minister in 2009 to 45 percent as he left.

Government spokesman Aleksandar Gjorgjiev said the cabinet respected a decision taken for health reasons, thanked Stavreski, and said its door would stay open. The date still drew a political reading. The resignation fell during the wiretapping crisis opened in 2015: Balkan Insight noted that a voice attributed to Stavreski on opposition-released recordings had criticized Gruevski’s spending, and that Stavreski had called the recordings “selective” and said they were not why he was leaving. The Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, through Damjan Manchevski, called him a “key figure” leaving a “sinking ship” and wished him a recovery. The New Social Democratic Party said he had resigned under pressure from Gruevski, whom it called his best man.

### Succession and the caretaker government

He left a cabinet that was already interim. Under the 2015 European Union-brokered Przino agreement, Gruevski was to resign as prime minister 100 days before early elections then set for 24 April 2016, and his party was to name an interim premier. On 14 January 2016 he said he would hand his resignation to the speaker the next morning. VMRO-DPMNE nominated its secretary-general, Emil Dimitriev. On 18 January, with Social Democratic deputies absent, the Assembly accepted Gruevski’s resignation. President [Gjorge Ivanov](/people/gjorge-ivanov) gave Dimitriev the mandate, and parliament elected the interim government by 72 votes and voted to dissolve itself ahead of the April poll. The elections were postponed twice. Stavreski remained finance minister and deputy prime minister in Dimitriev’s technical government until June.

The Assembly noted the resignation at its 106th session on 15 June 2016. A New Social Democratic Party motion to vote on the whole government, citing Article 94, paragraph 3, of the constitution on a change to one-third of the cabinet, was not accepted. Parliament then elected Kiril Minoski, director of the Public Revenue Office and formerly director of the State Market Inspectorate, as finance minister, by 67 votes to 19. He was sworn in the same day and said his priorities would be jobs, growth, investment and living standards. Deutsche Welle, citing the MIA news agency, spelled the surname Minovski; Sitel’s session report and Meta.mk’s account of the vote used Minoski. He was not also named deputy prime minister. Later in June the government website listed health minister Nikola Todorov and foreign minister Nikola Poposki as additional deputies to Dimitriev, with Vladimir Peshevski, Festim Halili and Arber Ademi.

Dimitriev’s caretaker government stayed in office through the delayed calendar. On 31 August 2016 the leaders of the four main parties, including Gruevski and Zoran Zaev, said conditions for early parliamentary elections had been met and agreed to hold them on [11 December 2016](/facts/2016-macedonian-parliamentary-election), with a further interim cabinet to be elected in September.

## Return to public life

### Party roles after 2021

After resigning in the summer of 2016 as minister of finance and deputy prime minister, Zoran Stavreski was largely absent from the political scene and from public life in North Macedonia for about five or six years. He left the cabinet then led by Emil Dimitriev, the technical prime minister who had replaced Nikola Gruevski before that year’s parliamentary elections. Reporting has also described Stavreski as the best man (*kum*) at Gruevski’s wedding in 2007.

He returned to VMRO-DPMNE working bodies after the 2021 local elections. On 3 December 2021 the party said it had formed a body, chaired by its president Hristijan Mickoski, to track whether mayors elected on the VMRO-DPMNE list carried out projects they had promised voters. The party named Stavreski and Oliver Shambevski—a former VMRO-DPMNE spokesman and member of parliament who had served as ambassador to China—as members, following a meeting between Mickoski and the new mayors. In June 2024 *Faktor* reported that, over the previous year, Stavreski had often appeared alongside members of the party leadership.

### The National Bank governorship and the Mickoski advisory post

During 2024 some outlets, citing party sources, reported that VMRO-DPMNE would propose Stavreski as governor of the National Bank of the Republic of North Macedonia. On 12 June 2024, as prime minister-designate, Mickoski said his opinion of Stavreski was of the highest order, calling him an exceptional expert and a deep specialist, but that proposing him for the bank “was not on the agenda at all, nor had it been discussed at all.”

On 28 January 2025, after reporters asked why advisers’ names were unpublished, Mickoski said he had 17 advisers, paid 60,000 denars a month except for three or four full-time government employees paid 90,000 denars. The government published the names the next day. In the table posted on the government’s open-government page he is listed as Zoran Stavrevski, “external adviser for finance and banking” (*надворешен советник за финансии и банкарство*). The same list included other officials from the Gruevski cabinets, among them former deputy prime minister Vladimir Peshevski, for strategic economic questions, and former Assembly speaker Trajko Veljanoski, for the parliamentary, political and judicial system. The published table does not state individual fees.

The governorship was filled later that spring. On 19 May 2025 the Media Information Agency reported that Anita Angelovska-Bezhoska, who had taken office on 22 May 2018, was due to leave on 21 May. Names then discussed in public included Stavreski, Trajko Slaveski—president of the Skopje city council, an economics professor and a former finance minister—and the incumbent. That day Mickoski said he and President [Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova](/people/gordana-siljanovska-davkova) had no disagreements: “We have not discussed a candidate, but candidates.” On 21 May her office nominated Slaveski, saying the choice had been difficult given the quality of all the candidates, and sent the proposal to the Assembly of North Macedonia, which elects the governor by a simple majority. MIA reported on 29 May that, a few minutes before midnight, parliament elected Slaveski by 68 votes to 16; speakers from the governing coalition emphasised his record, while opposition members, including from the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, questioned whether his party affiliation sat with the bank’s independence. Angelovska-Bezhoska handed over the office at the National Bank on 30 May 2025.

### Consulting practice

On 19 June 2025 Stavreski founded ЗАКС консалтинг ДООЕЛ Скопје (Zaks Consulting DOOEL), a single-member company in central Skopje that *Faktor* described as a financial consulting bureau. He remained one of Mickoski’s external advisers for finance and banking. *Faktor* presented the registration as following Slaveski’s nomination, after which it was clear Stavreski would not lead the central bank, and described him as having been on an informal shortlist of names discussed for the post through the end of May.

The outlet later compared 2025 accounts for consultancies linked to three former finance ministers, all registered for advice on business operations and other management. Because ЗАКС was founded on 19 June, those accounts cover about half a year: *Faktor* reported revenue of 507,967 denars, expenses of 55,085 denars and profit of 452,882 denars, with no employee count shown. In the same comparison, Datalitiks ORG, founded on 10 February 2025 by Dragan Tevdovski with another partner, showed 347,001 denars of revenue and 10,313 denars of profit and one employee; Strategers, founded in 2020 and wholly owned by [Fatmir Besimi](/people/fatmir-besimi) before 2025, showed 6,432,153 denars of revenue, 50,960 denars of profit and four employees. On those filings Besimi’s firm had the largest turnover and Stavreski’s the largest profit, the latter on a partial year.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/zoran-stavreski