TIRANA, Jan. 25 – Albania has won its first legal battle against Italian businessman Francesco Becchetti over cancelled waste management and renewable energy projects in Albania whose construction dates back two decades ago.
Paris-based International Court of Arbitration has turned down a claim by the Italian businessman who was seeking €137 million in compensation over the Albanian government’s cancellation of his Kalivac hydropower plant along the Vjosa River, southern Albania. The court has ruled Becchetti’s Hydro S.R.L will pay Albania €1.2 million in legal and other costs it has incurred for its defence, according to a preliminary decision published by Energy Minister Damian Gjiknuri.
The energy ministry says the Court will decide in a final award over the Albanian government’s claim of incurring €170 million in damages from Becchetti’s failure to implement the project and tax-related fraud.
In two other arbitration trials in the U.S. and Vienna, the Italian businessman whose Albania assets, including a local TV station, were seized in mid-2015 on suspicion of money laundering and fraud-related offences, is seeking hundreds of millions of euros in compensation over unfinished waste management and renewable energy production projects in Albania.
Bechetti is estimated to have obtained about $213 million in an arbitration dispute with Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, for the delayed financing in the failed Albania hydropower plant where the German giant was a partner and 45 shareholder from 2008 to 2010, according to a media investigation.
After cancelling the Becchetti contract in early 2017, the Albanian government announced an Albanian-Turkish consortium as the winner of the Kalivac HPP, a €120 million with a capacity of 120 MW along the Vjosa River, southern Albania, that Becchetti was supposed to build.
The Becchetti case is one of the four unspecified cases that pose a €2 billion threat, about a fifth of the country’s GDP, to Albania’s public finances.
A late 2017 leaked confidential document showing that Albania faces the threat of being punished with a staggering €2 billion from a handful of arbitration cases with foreign companies has raised concern over the devastating effects it would have on the country’s public finances and one of Europe’s poorest economies.
