The largest Macedonian opposition party VMRO-DPMNE filed criminal charges against three top country’s officials for “signing and ratifying the unconstitutional and illegal deal with Greece about (a new) name for the state,” the Beta news agency reported.

The charges were filed against Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov, and Parliament Speaker Talat Xhaferi.

The VMRO-DPMNE party spokesperson Naum Stoilkoviski told reporters in Skopje late on Thursday that they also sued all parliamentarians who again voted for the agreement.

He said that the defendants committed four crimes: treason, the undermining of independence, joining in hostile activities and the abuse of office.

The ruling SDMS party said the charges were “unfounded and filed out of despair.”

The nationalist VMRO-DPMNE, the largest single party in the Parliament, known as Sobranie, filed charges after the majority of the MPs voted for the second time earlier on Thursday to approve the deal with Greece renaming the country as the Republic of North Macedonia.

Gjordje Ivanov, the Macedonian President, supported by the nationalists, used his constitutional right to veto the agreement after Sobranie ratified it for the first time and refused to sign it.

Under the constitution, he should sign it after the second vote but said he would not.

For the agreement to be valid, it has to be published it in the Official Gazzete.

The deal ended the 27-year-old dispute during which Greece was blocking Macedonia in its Euro-Atlantic integrations.

“The VMRO-DPMNE unfounded charges are not just false, but also a sign that they (the opposition) would like to continue with the abuse of judiciary as they had been doing for 11 years,” the ruling party said in a statement.

It added that “such desperate steps show that VMRO-DPMNE has no any argument.”

The Macedonian and Greek foreign ministers signed the deal on country’s new name on June 17, days after the prime ministers of the two states agreed on it.

In the meantime, in Sarajevo, Zaev was named the Person of the year by The jury of the Independent Agency for the Selection of Best Managers, together with his Bulgarian counterpart Boyko Borissov.

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