TIRANA, Nov. 16, 2022 – A huge proposed redevelopment project that aims to transform the coastline of Albania’s largest port city has become the center of a bitter public fight between Albania’s ruling and opposition parties.
Prime Minister Edi Rama says it is the greatest foreign investment ever in Albania, reaching 2 billion euros. Opposition leaders say it is “a massive corrupt affair.”
The proposed project envisions moving the commercial port of Durres to a new location to turn the current area into a tourism port and build thousands of new apartments, hospitality units and stores in the area with most of the investment coming from large development companies in the United Arab Emirates.
Critics are worried Albania is giving away too much to make the project possible, while the opposition says lack of transparency could hide more nefarious elements, like money laundering and corruption.
Prime Minister Rama has been furious at the criticism of the investment, using previously unheard harsh language calling the opposition “infidels without a homeland” and “trash” for questioning his project to “transform Durres.”
On Wednesday, Rama turned on the media, cursing it for providing coverage of the opposition’s criticism.
“The number of ridiculous things that are being said about the major project of the Durrës Tourist Port as well as the media space available to the wicked people who are fighting the project like the devil, are the reflection of the evil that follows this place like a curse since 1912,” Rama wrote on Twitter.
The leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, Sali Berisha said Rama’s curses and “dirty language” hopes to draw attention away from the relevant concerns of the opposition. Berisha added that Rama and a “corrupt circle” are hiding behind the project to conduct a “a terrible heist” of the most strategic property Albania has — the Durres Port — so that he can benefit from “millions of narco-euros.”
Berisha said the party would organize massive protests against the project, launch an investigative commission in parliament and take all the legal steps available to stop it.
Opposition seeks injunction and ruling by Constitutional Court
A group of 37 opposition members of parliament filed a request at the Constitutional Court to void a law pushed through by the ruling Socialist Party that makes the project possible. They argue the special law is incompatible with the Constitution and international agreements.
The law relates to an agreement for economic cooperation between the governments of Albania and the United Arab Emirates, which also includes massive funding for the redevelopment of the Port of Durrës.
The opposition MPs want Albania’s highest court to suspend implementation of the law until it makes a final decision.
The request was submitted to the Constitutional Court by Oerd Bylykbashi, representative of the Democratic Party, whose leadership says it is worried the project is a major source of corruption and money laundering.
They also say the project’s approval lacks transparency and did not go through a proper competition process.
The bilateral agreement in question makes it easier to promote and protect investments between UAE and Albania. The agreement talks about a wide area of cooperation in economy, agriculture and tourism.
It was approved by the government at the end of November 2020 and within a week it was approved in the parliament with 91 votes in favor, 5 against and 4 abstentions, at the time when the Democratic Party had given up its seats in parliament in protest. A year later, on Dec. 2, 2021, the Strategic Investments Committee approved the Durres Marina and Yachts Project, as an integrated project with a tourist port and elite accommodation structures — high-standard residences and services.
“The agreements regarding the state’s participation in this investment are not clear and not transparent even today,” the opposition says in its filing with the Constitutional Court.
The filing comes as the government submitted Wednesday to the Parliament for approval of a final agreement on the redevelopment of the area of the Port of Durres using an accelerated procedure.
The agreement with the investors was signed in August, and the government brought it to Albania’s parliament, where it was met with criticism and doubts from the opposition, as soon as it was learned that an accelerated procedure was being used, which could lead to less scrutiny and debate.
The government in a rush to start the project
Prime Minister Rama said in the last parliamentary session that the rush to approve the deal was about working with “a personality of the global economy, a representative of one of the largest companies in the world that comes to Albania as a result of a strategic relationship.”
Rama added that investment being made could never be imagined before and it “transforms Durrës into one of the most important tourism spots in the Mediterranean.”
Rama said that no more time should be wasted, as the contract was negotiated for over a year, and it is a contract in which the Albanian state participates with shares.
“The investment we will make in the Port of Durres is a national symbol for a new era, which employs 12,000 people directly and indirectly, which does not take a single cent from the state budget, is bringing in 2 billion or so, maybe even more, depending on how it will develop from the outside,” Rama said.
The draft law is expected to be debated as a final step in parliament, where a Socialist majority can easily pass it. It then paves the way for work to start, unless the Constitutional Court does issue a specific injunction as requested by the opposition.
Opposition furious at ‘mega-affair’
Chairman of the opposition Freedom Party Ilir Meta said the Port of Durres redevelopment project is “not strategic but a construction business to clean dirty money.”
He added the ruling Socialists would be held responsible for “the biggest mega-affair which is precisely the robbery of the Port of Durrës, Albania’s most strategic asset.”
Meta said the most important property from the strategic and economic point of view of Albania will be given to shell companies with hidden owners.
“With unknown owners, with unknown funds and whose origin is unknown. Simply said, no Albanian knows in whose hands such a colossal property is ending up,” Meta said.
He argued that rather than a strategic project, the proposal is a construction project of buildings and apartments, since “at the end of this whole project, only two hotels with 800 beds and a small marina with 280 parking spaces were built.”
The opposition also argues against hundreds of millions of euros in tax incentives provided for in the law, 820,000 square meters of prime real estate with a value of hundreds of millions of euros will be “given away” to the developers, while funds for other needed expropriations will also be done by the state.
In a statement to the press, the opposition FP says the project has the potential to be a massive “money laundering scheme,” because only 6.8 percent of the 2 billion euro investment will be financed, while the rest, 93.2 percent, will be self-financed, meaning “waiting for the apartments to be sold to continue the investment with the other apartments.”
