Hashim Thaci, president of Kosovo. Photo: Atdhe Mulla

Six wiretapped phone conversations involving Hashim Thaci and Adem Grabovci, head of the parliamentary group of the ruling Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK, which were made public on Friday by website Insajderi.com, suggest that the two men agreed by phone about who to put into which public sector position and about how to pressurise MPs to adopt two laws.

At the time when the tapes were made in 2011, Thaci was prime minister of Kosovo and the leader of the PDK, while Grabovci was deputy minister of transport and telecommunications.

Thaci and Grabovci were careful in the conversations and mostly used code names for the people they discussed, without mentioning the specific positions in the state administration which they wanted give to their people.

The tapes appear to reveal that Thaci and Grabovci communicated regularly and consulted over a wide variety of issues, including international relations.

The two men also discussed how to ensure that two important laws that needed to be passed in order to end the international supervision of Kosovo would be approved by MPs.

The two laws, which regulated the historic centres of Prizren and Hoqa e Madhe/Velika Hoca, were meant to preserve Serbian Orthodox cultural heritage, but at the time faced strong resistance from MPs who were demanding that some parts of the legislation be reviewed.

In one of the tapes released on Friday, in which Grabovci is talking to Naser Krasniqi, alias The Face, who was at the time in custody, accused of war crimes, Grabovci said he had threatened the parliamentary speaker that if “he causes any trouble, The Face will deal with him”.

BIRN tried to contact Thaci’s office for a comment, but received no reply by the time of publication. Basri Musmurati, the secretary of the PDK, refused to comment on the tapes when contacted by BIRN.

A protest was being held by civil society activists on Friday evening in Pristina to express discontent about the claims made in the wiretaps.

Insajderi.com started publishing the conversations between Grabovci and various PDK officials on August 1.

The brief extracts allegedly reveal how Grabovci influenced appointments to top public sector positions.

The tapes were made between November and December 2011, when Grabovci was being investigated for alleged corruption by the EU rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, EULEX.

Insajderi.com has said it will publish the Grabovci recordings in their entirety in the coming days.

After a meeting on Thursday with EULEX’s chief prosecutor, Claudio Pala, the office of Aleksander Lumezi, Kosovo’s State Prosecutor, said prosecutors from the EU rule-of-law mission had started evaluating the wiretapped conversations.

Depending on the outcome, Lumezi might form a team of prosecutors to launch an official investigation into the claims, his office said.