Today Parliament debated the fiscal package for 2018, which includes the government plan to offer 4- and 5-star hotels 10 years of VAT exemption. Even though the IMF has expressed doubt that this will a viable policy to attract new foreign investments, and suggested it opened the possibility of unfair competition, the Prime Minister passionately defended his proposal:
We are a country about which all those patriotic prime minister said that it’s the most beautiful, best, touristic and with seas, winds that blow, and with a sun goes up in the east more beautifully than anywhere else. And today we are the only country in the entire region that doesn’t have a 5-star hotel. We will build 5-star hotels in Albania.
Edi Rama seems to forget that exactly one year ago, on November 16, 2016 he inaugurated the “first 5-star hotel” in Tirana, about which he wrote the following words:
Yesterday at the inauguration ceremony of Hotel Plaza, another work in the collection of European architectural pearls, valued internationally by the MoMA in New York as one of the 10 most impressive buildings built in the last 10 years; exhibited as a model at a place of honor at the Venice Architecture Biennial which is the most prestigious platform for showing global architecture. This work is now part of the landscape of the capital, a beautiful presence, very attractive and not only that, but also a stimulus for the imagination of everyone who sees it. There there is also no doubt that it is the first 5-star hotel in Tirana.
As the only 5-star hotel in Albania, the Plaza, owned by one of Albania’s rich oligarchs, will be one of the few direct profiters of Rama’s tax plan, while the government and foreign institutions such as the EU Delegation in Tirana continue to spend money on its premises, as recently a the EU–Western Balkans Media Days.
If Rama’s plan is allowed to pass, all the profits made by The Plaza from public money of Albanian and EU citizens will go directly in the pockets of its owners, rather than actually stimulating the Albanian economy as a whole.
And in order to obscure this fact, the Prime Minister chose today “forget” Albania’s “first 5-star hotel.”
