After a few days of silence, the telecom operators in Macedonia issued statements (NovaTV link in Macedonian), claiming that they have not broken the law, and that they are in full compliance of article 175 of the Macedonian law for electronic communications i.e. the article that governs procedures for lawful interception of telephone calls, despite allegations made by Mr. Zaev on Monday.

However, as NovaTV already established (link also in Macedonian), at least one of the recorded, and now made public, conversations took place in 2011. At that time the law that was in use didn't even have 175 articles.

In fact, the Law on electronic communications which was in use up until February 2014 had an article 115 which clearly stated that telecom operators must keep a permanent record of any lawful interception taking place and that they must protect this information as a secret according to law. However, for a short period of 6 months - from June 2010 to December 2010, when the Constitutional court stroke it down, that article was amended in a way that allowed unsupervised wiretapping.

Mr. Zaev so far claimed that at least two people have been wiretapped four years or more - himself, and Dragan Pavlovikj - Latas - a prominent pro-government TV editor. If this is true then the telecom operators must have records dating back to 2010 according to article 115 of the law as described above, or at least, to have the knowledge that lawful wiretapping took place. Claiming that they couldn't know anything is at least misinterpretation of the facts.

The law was completely rewritten and passed in February 2014 and this obligation was removed in the new text (link to ALL laws on electronic communications - in Macedonian).

This article was updated to correct the dates of the laws.