On May 15, the Court of Tirana convicted the Italian entrepreneur Antonio Abrusci, the owner of Ecologica Albania shpk, to maximum sentence of 3 years for the falsification of documents. After his conviction, he profited from sentence reduction. He now has to spend 1.5 years in prison and has no possibility to appeal. It is still unknown whether after finishing his sentence there will be an extradition request from Italy.
What happened here deserves a detailed explanation, to show that the courts sometimes actually function.
Abrusci worked in Albania since the 2000s, in the waste collection sector as a contractor of the Municipality of Tirana. He used different companies to win public tenders, and one of these companies was called Ecologica Albania, the only company in which he wasn’t a shareholder.
Abrusci’s companies profited from many contracts with the Municipality of Tirana. But in the last tenders, one of the contracts was cancelled because he didn’t complete his work correctly and could therefore not compete in the tender for the extension of the contract.
To avoid this ban, Abrusci used a different company, which had made him director for just four months, from November 2015 until March 2016.
These four months were enough to participate in several tenders organized in Tirana and Kavaja, after which an Albanian was nominated director in his stead.
But the tender organized by the Municipality of Kavaja for the collection of urban waste contained several questionable provisions. Participating companies would have to provide documentation for the vehicles that would be used, accounting reports and certificates of the production year of the vehicles.
This in order to avoid companies from using older vehicles for the waste collection work, which are bought outside the country for little money but are not efficient and often very polluting.
Even though in fact it would be logical and more efficient only to control the vehicles of the winning company at the moment it would start work, once the contract would be implemented.
There are endless old companies taking part in public procurement procedures, and such requests specified in the tender documentation, which are in reality unnecessary, can be used to predetermine the winner and disqualify all the others based on formal irregularities. This technique is used on a daily basis in tender procedures of the national and local governments.
Not having the right vehicles, Abrusci, as happens often with tender participants, falsified the documentation with the idea that he would buy new trucks if he won the tender. With these falsified documents he was declared winner of two tenders in Tirana and Kavaja.
A competitor in one of those tenders filed a complaint and that is how the Abrusci’s falsification was discovered. The prosecution immediately started an investigation and afterward the Italian entrepreneur was sentenced in court to the maximum term in prison that is provided by the Penal Code.
Abrusci has left Albania and the verdict was made in absentia.
