TIRANA, June 5- The government’s project for the Tirana-Durres highway concession is still unclear, but what is surely known is the fact that the expansion of the highway will flatten for the second time within five years the costly trees in its arteries for which the citizens of Tirana have already paid a bill of 332 million lek (2.7 million euros). Despite the motorway extension project, the Municipality of Tirana pushed forward plans to replace softwood palm trees at the entrance of the capital in November 2017.
Two months later, through a subordinate department the Municipality of Tirana foresaw the winning company “Fusha LLC” while concluding a negotiated contract with no prior announcement based on an exception to the “Public Procurement” law, used in cases of extreme need or for unforeseen events. A contract worth 332 million lek for planting pines from Kamza up to the Kashar overpass was added to the 90 million lek (735 thousand euros) bill that the Ministry of Environment spent in 2014 to green the same segment with palm trees.
The Municipality’s contract with the Fusha company was denounced by representatives of the Democratic Party in the Tirana Municipal Council, who accused Mayor Veliaj of paying 500 thousand lek (4 thousand euros) for a pine, and sued him to the prosecutor. The Tirana Prosecutor’s Office has registered since September 2018 a criminal proceeding for the acts of “abuse of duty” and “violation of the equality of participation in tenders” on the contract signed with Fusha LLC. The matter is still under investigation though, and there are no detained or suspended persons yet.
Tirana Mayor Erion Veliaj, who runs for a second term in the June 30 elections has turned tree planting into one of his strongholds while publishing hundreds of pictures in various areas of Tirana with shovels and picks in his hands near saplings and open pits. But unlike routine publicity, planting pines on the Tirana-Durres highway in early 2018 was silenced by him. The funds for replacing the softwood palms with pines were approved in a mid-term budget change at the Tirana City Council by the end of 2017, with the reasoning that palm trees could not survive these temperatures. The contract being investigated by the Tirana Prosecutor’s Office for “violation of the equality of tenders” was given to Fusha LLC without an open competition for greening the two sides of the segment “Kamza Overpass – Kashar Overpass.”
A fund of about 332 million lek to be disbursed through 2017-2019 was made available to Fusha LLC. After a second amendment to the Municipal Council decision, the contract was fully executed during January and May 2018. Investigative news site Balkan Insight (BIRN) has requested the Municipality documentation regarding the Fusha LLC contract for the trees, but it was answered that “the requested information was seized with a decision of the Prosecution on Sept. 24, 2018, and for this reason it is no longer accessible.”
BIRN then counted the pines planted from the Kamza until the Kashar overpass. The news organization counted 405 pine trees on both sides of the 7 kilometers road. The number of trees reported in January and May 2018 is 485 pieces in total. However, it has been previously reported that the expenses for road greenery for the months of January and May 2018 are higher than usual as they include the installation of decorative trees in this segment. The market price of decorative wood from three companies in Albania selling these products varied from from 700 to 1000 euros, but the Municipality of Tirana paid Fusha LLC prices ranging from 5500 euro per pine for the number of trees reported by the Municipality (485), to 6500 euro per pine for the number of trees that BIRN counted (405).
The concession plan for the Tirana-Durres highway is not new and was preceded by a project of the Albanian Road Authority (ARA) for its expansion from two to three lanes, publicly introduced in September 2016. But the concern about overlapping projects on the highway to the detriment of the state budget is still pressing. At the beginning of 2016 the project of the Ministry of Environment for palm planting on the highway became part of a denunciation that the Supreme State Audit made to the then leaders of the Albanian Road Authority.
The SSA’’s concern was related to the money spent on the Tirana-Durres highway, while the project for its expansion was being prepared with tenders for rehabilitation of the Customs Roundabout, improvement of road signage, and palm trees in the Kamza overpass to Kashar. All three projects together had the cost of about 4.7 million euros without VAT. the SSA wrote that these investments are short-term and irresponsibly aggravate the state budget. The Tirana Municipality contract on the road administered by ARA has further inflated the investment costs expected to be offset by the extension of the Tirana-Durres highway.
ARA wrote that the expansion of the Tirana-Durres highway is a project drafted in the period 2014-2016 where all interest groups met for a public consultation to which the Municipality of Tirana was present, diverting thus the responsibility from itself regarding state budget expenditure.
