It is not only former Minister of Interior Saimir Tahiri who has been implicated in the revelations from the Habilaj dossier compiled by the Italian police. The wiretapped conversations also throw light on the mysteriously “malfunctioning” radar system deployed by the Interinstitutional Naval Operations Center (QNOD), which falls under the responsibility of the Ministry of Defense and former Minister of Defense Mimi Kodheli.
In late August, General Director of the State Police Haki Çako complained that the QNOD has consistently failed to capture signs of speedboats trafficking drugs across the Adriatic Sea to Italy, even though the system should be able to do so:
[I]n quite a few cases the police has requested to retrieve from the system events with concrete times and dates, […] but in none of the cases evidence was found in the system, even though the boats captured by the Guardia di Finanze in Italy have been of the size that should have been discovered and identified by this system.
The Ministry of Defense immediately declared that the statements of the police chief were “without merit”:
Through this joint declaration we inform the public that the integrated system for observation of the naval space, a system installed in 2009, is fully functional.
Any other claim is without merit, untrue, and ill-willed.
The 419-page dossier on Habilaj and his collaborators, however, shows clearly that the criminal group had people inside the QNOD able to switch off the system or erase records.:
The intercepted conversations provide evidence that Habilaj enjoyed the support of local police directors, as well as an employee of the naval control in the operation room in Tirana […]
Habilaj: He has called because he’s in the room… What do you call it? The room is in another port of the capital. He sees everything for me. He even manages to watch the fish from there. Because he’s a friend of a friend of ours… They asked him “what is that ship?” … and he told them “what ship?”… “How is it possible that it entered one mile into the Greek territorial waters?”
An audit from the State Supreme Audit Institution (KLSh) covering 2013 and 2014 from September 2015 had already concluded that there were serious irregularities with the 2013 public procurement procedure for the maintenance of the radar system. The Ministry of Defense had chosen for a closed procedure, whereas an open procedure was legally mandatory. The Ministry also failed to invite Lockheed Martin to place a bid, even though they had designed and constructed the radar system. Instead, the Ministry spent more than 750 million lekë to contract an Albanian company, IDEA-TEL, which moreover failed to live up to the deadlines of the maintenance contract, causing 41 million lekë damage to the state.
The KLSh ordered Minister Kodheli to penalize IDEA-TEL for violating the contract and to take disciplinary measures against Brigade General Qemal Shkurti. In short, the KLSh stated that the entire procurement procedure had been “compromised.”
Based on the above information from the Habilaj dossier the illegal actions of Minister Kodheli take a more serious tone. Why would the Minister of Defense insist on an expensive contract with an incompetent Albanian company, when internationally renowned company Lockheed Martin, which even constructed the radar system, had a much better offer? What would be the advantage of having a local, Albanian company having take care of the maintenance of a radar system in place to monitor the Albanian waters, rather than an outsider?
These are urgent questions that demand an answer from former Minister Kodheli.
