Last week it has been revealed that the company Alko Impex Construction shpk, owned by the nephew of Socialist MP Sadri Abazi, had been awarded tenders through the use of falsified documentation, in clear violation of the competition and the law.
The company started to win a string of important tenders immediately after Abazi resigned from his company Usluga, to avoid a conflict of interest once he entered Parliament as MP.
In 2013, Sadri Abazi’s nephew, Arbër Abazi, entered the game as administrator of the Albanian branch of Alko Impex, a company based in Kosovo.
Lately, it was also revealed that the company has falsified the resumes of its engineers. However, a simple Google search of the company’s name reveals several important details, which, if pieced together, aptly demonstrate how, exactly, the Rama government has planned and conceived the distribution of money in the country; how the contents of the “baking tray” will be divided.
It is interesting to note how this company, immediately after November 2013, quickly started winning several tenders concerning city cleaning, road construction, water and sanitation, school reconstruction, the construction and furnishing of expensive power plants on behalf of the energy company OShEE, etc. The overwhelming majority of these tenders have been awarded by local and central government institutions controlled by the Socialist Party.
No conclusive estimate of the total amount of money the company has been awarded in tenders exists yet, but the estimate for the 5 last years must be approximately $100 million.
In order to understand the company’s approach when it came to tenders, we decided to review some Commission for Public Procurement (KPP) decisions. KPP is responsible for reviewing complaints filed against state institutions in the context of tenders.
Having reviewed the KPP decisions on Alko Impex, what appears on the horizon is perhaps the clearest indicator of how Edi Rama’s “Rilingje” movement has parceled out the state budget for its clients. It demonstrates how Rama has created an entirely private, nearly mafia-like, plan to divide the “baking tray.”
When Alko Impex had been disqualified for a tender and had filed a complaint at KPP, the commission claimed that the company lacked the proper documentation, was unable to prove it had paid taxes, was unable to prove its technical qualifications, and dismissed its complaints.
Yet, in other tenders, when Alko Impex had been awarded a tender and its competitors had filed complaints at KPP, that same commission then turned around and claimed that the company possessed full financial capacity, had paid the proper taxes, was equipped with the necessary technical qualifications, human resources and ISO certifications, and that its documentation was in order.
The same KPP that in some instances disqualifies Alko Impex for its shortcomings, in other instances confirms its qualifications by claiming those shortcomings don’t exist. How can this double-consciousness be explained?
The explanation lies in the “baking tray of power.”
Tenders and public funding are conceived of as slices of the baking tray’s contents, one tender for Sadri, one tender to someone else, while the KPP not only fails to represent a legal and technical authority that implements the law, but has instead transformed into a sort of mechanism responsible for guaranteeing that the “booty” will be split up properly according to the political instructions.
Similar to the mafia’s modus operandi, the “slices” are divided and a “team” is appointed to make sure that they will go where the leader wants them to. Competitions and technical criteria are crude jokes, slices don’t need competitions.
This system of the baking tray has been conceived by Edi Rama, the Prime Minister that runs the KPP with an iron fist, the commission being one of the few institutions the members of which are carefully selected by Rama himself and which is directly under his control.
Yet, even though on the surface it seems to be a perfect system of corruption and clientelism, which does not falter at any step, the latest media revelations demonstrate that the Prime Minister’s clients have reached a whole other level of confidence and arrogance, considering that Alko Impex had the nerve to file falsified documents for tenders.
This blatant and egregious violation does not leave any place for interpretation, if even the Elbasan Prosecution Office has opened a criminal case for falsification.
We will have to wait and see what stance Minister of Infrastructure and Energy Damian Gjiknuri will take on this. Until now he had no reason to worry, as, whenever the companies complained, he could wave the KPP decisions in their face to shut them up.
After the revelation of the falsified documents and the opening of an investigation, the system has failed and those KPP decisions will hardly work anymore.
What will Gjiknuri do? Will he keep playing the “game” or will the baking tray system jump to a new level, in which falsifications will not pose any problem and companies using fake documentation will not suffer any repercussions or penalties?
Whatever Gjiknuri decides to do, the exposure of Alko Impex’s fraud illustrates perfectly the way in which the distribution of money works in Edi Rama’s clientelist network, his mafia network in which Alko Impex represents Sadri Abazi’s own slice, his own mafia.
This article first appeared on Hashtag.al, translation by Exit.
