TIRANA, Jan. 14 – The Albanian government has awarded a €150,000 bonus to U.K.-based Omnia Strategy, led by Cherie Blair, the wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, also an adviser to the Albanian PM, over brokering an arbitration dispute deal, increasing the total fee paid to this law firm to €645,000.
The decision was made on Dec. 28, few months after Albania reached an amicable deal with U.S.-based Rapiscan over a controversial customs scanning concession approved by the previous Democratic Party-led government which the current Socialist Party-led government cancelled after it came to power in late 2013.
Under the Omnia Strategy-brokered deal, the Albanian government withdrew from its decision to cancel a 15-year scanning concession in customs points reaching an out-of-court solution with U.S.-based Rapiscan Systems which was claiming $350 million in a Paris arbitration court over the unilateral cancellation of the concession.
Under the new deal, the fee for declarations of more than €1,000 with customs authorities was reduced to €22, down from an initial €39 while the charge for declarations of up to €1,000 was set at € 5.
Last year’s Mrs. Blair lucrative contract with the Albanian government also attracted the attention of British media.
The deal in Albania follows the award of a contract to Mrs. Blair by the Kazakhstan government, where her husband is also an official, paid adviser to the country’s autocratic president Nursultan Nazarbayev, wrote The Telegraph.
Albania is just one of a number of countries advised by Mr. Blair, through his company, Tony Blair Associates, which he set up on leaving Downing Street in 2007. Mr Blair has lucrative deals with Kazakhstan, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates and Mongolia among others.
Tony Blair has insisted the Albanian taxpayer does not fund his team based in Tirana, although it is not clear who exactly is paying for the advisers on the ground, among them the nephew of Alastair Campbell, Mr. Blair’s former spin doctor, writes The Telegraph.
The Omnia Strategy renegotiated deal also revised downward Rapiscan expected income to a maximum of €210 million in its 15-year concession compared to €316 million under the previous deal.
Last December, the Albanian government approved some new changes to the deal eliminating double payments after complaints by the business community over the compulsory payment of the tariff up to three times for the same goods.
The new changes to the deal will exclude 150,000 customs declarations from the compulsory tariffs, worth €4 million annually, which will be handled by the state budget, practically by Albanian taxpayers, the finance ministry has earlier said.
The scanning, intended to curb smuggling and tax evasion, was made compulsory last September after a review of the concession contract reducing the initial 2013 customs screening tariffs.
