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The last operation of SPAK, as well as the other case in the trial, that of the Elbasan incinerator, suggests that the rate of corruption in public procurement in Albania should vary from 20 to 40% of the limit fund. If we allow ourselves to speculate, we can say that somewhere between 200 and 400 million euros per year of taxpayers' money ends up in the pockets of officials every year.
Tenders for works supervision are considered small tenders. They cost a few thousand euros and are used to contract a company that supervises the works undertaken by another company. As a link that serves as a watchdog and must guarantee the quality and quantity of contracted works, despite the small value, these contracts are important. And yet, these are the tenders that almost never attract the attention of the media and citizens, due to the low value.
Things seem to have changed this weekend, when the Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime, SPAK, announced that it has arrested two government employees, one, the Secretary General of the Ministry of Health and the other, an employee of a structure known as " co-governance", a controversial structure that has united the Socialist Party with the Albanian state, leaving no dividing line between the two.
According to SPAK, the Co-Government employee has given an amount of 330 thousand ALL to the General Secretary, with the intention that this will favor an economic operator in a tender. The tender in question is entitled: "Lot 1 "Supervision for the reconstruction of some Health Centers in the districts of Tirana and Durrës".
The Public Procurement Agency has announced the opening of the tender on May 10 and the closing on May 22. DRICONS company has been announced as the winner for this tender. SPAK's announcement does not reveal which operator the bribe money was paid to favor, but what is noticeable is that the tender in question, as far as it appears from the participation data, the number of offers and the result, seems far from tender dog suspected of manipulation. Consequently, against the DRICONS company, there is no public data to suggest corruption, although many are surprised by the fact that SPAK has arrested two government officials for receiving money for favoring "an operator" but they have not arrested any operator. And this is another case where SPAK's logic defies accepted logic.
The announcement of the winner [Link], says that for lot 1, eight companies participated with offers that ranged from 638 thousand to 754 thousand ALL, while the limit fund was 806 thousand ALL. The winning bid was worth 672,000 ALL, or 83% of the limit fund. In short, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to pay such a large amount of money in a very normal tender of small value. The 330 thousand ALL that were found in the office of the Secretary General of the Ministry of Health, constitute 41% of the limit fund and almost 50% of the winning bid fund.
This leads us to another question: what should be the usual rate of corruption in the tenders of Albanian public institutions?
Another SPAK file can help us with this question. It is about the case of the Elbasan incinerator, for which former minister Lefter Koka is awaiting trial for corruption, money laundering and abuse of office.
The Elbasan incinerator was granted a concession in 2015 with an emergency procedure and without competition. The total value of the contract was 21.6 million euros, while SPAK has identified several phantom companies, which were initially denounced by LSI, that are believed to have been used by concession businessmen to pay Koka's bribe.
Koka is accused of having benefited 3.1 million euros from the fictitious invoices of Albtek Energji with a number of ghost companies and nearly 2 million more from ITS, the other company of the concession. In short, of the 21.6 million euros of the Elbasan concession contract, 5.1 million or 24% of the total ended up as bribes for the minister, according to the indictment. SPAK's investigation into the incinerator problem is, at best, sketchy. The three cases, Elbasan, Fieri and Tirana, have been divided into three separate files despite the fact that the characters are the same in all three cases. The companies that are supposed to have invoiced unfinished works and were simply used as a means of payment for corruption in Elbasan, have also invoiced the concession of the incinerator of Fier and that of Tirana.
And for more, of course, two tenders, one with a suspected corruption rate of 24% and the other, with a 50% corruption rate, do not constitute a sample and it is difficult to extrapolate from these two figures. It's just that the fact remains that two and a half years after its creation, SPAK hasn't built up any extensive track record of money laundering investigations so, at the moment, we don't have a choice. What is known is that the various public authorities in Albania annually carry out procurement procedures ranging from 800 million to 1 billion euros. And if these are the rates of corruption, then an amount of at least 200 million euros per year ends up in the pockets of officials. And considering how poor a country Albania is, the 200 million a year is enough to destroy any chance for a legal and democratic state./Reporter.al
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