Skopje, 7 May 2022 (MIA) – The Macedonian police is already on a very high level in cooperation with Europol. Now we have to set the next steps, to take the next steps and we have to go after the money of the criminal organizations. This is the message that Executive Director of Europol, Catherine De Bolle, sent to the Macedonian police in an interview with MIA. She pointed out that cooperation is very good on an operational level. “We have direct interaction with North Macedonia police services, we have the people from the police in our office and we work on different cases in different crime areas together, and we obtain good results.” Europol’s Executive Director highlighted good cooperation with North Macedonia related to migrant smuggling. “Because of your geographical position here in the region you are of key importance, so they use this as a transit area, and illegal migration is often used by organized crime groups,” she said. According to De Bolle, supplementary efforts are needed in terms of economic and financial crime, encryption for instance, encrypted communication, adding that it is very difficult for police officers to tackle that. De Bolle told MIA that the Western Balkan region is of key importance to cooperate with, noting that North Macedonia was the first country in the region with whom Europol concluded an operational agreement in 2012. Since 2015, she added, “we have liaison offices from North Macedonia in the headquarters of Europol.“ “Cooperation between regions in the fight against organized crime is of key importance because you can only break a criminal network if you have a good police cooperation network. That is why I am here. For us, the Western Balkan region is of key importance to cooperate with. We have with all the Western Balkan countries operational agreements, so we can closely work together to tackle organized crime and to fight terrorism,” De Bolle says in the interview with MIA, which will be available in full on Sunday.