TIRANA, Dec 23 /ATA/ – Prime Minister Edi Rama reacted to the main opposition Democratic Party lawmakers over alleged offshore companies during regular plenary session of parliament on Wednesday:
Mr Shehaj (opposition lawmaker), you claimed that I am hiding behind an offshore company in the Netherlands and I invited you to take the floor and provide a single evidence to support your claims, because this is a very serious accusation that I allegedly hide wealth offshore in the Netherlands and you state it literally as if you posses an evidence, but if you can present such an evidence, then I shouldn’t be here, but in front of the justice.
And I invited you to present evidence. This is because I don’t really know what else to say when someone takes the floor to accuse the head of the government publicly, alleging that I hide behind an offshore company in the Netherlands and then shows up here to stage a Švejk-like comedy, telling us that the length of Tirana-Vlora highway is X km and I was born in Selenice and therefore jump to the conclusion that your grandmother is 72 years old.
These are extreme accusations that one can level only when supported by evidence.
It is impossible to occupy the floor at this very hall and address the whole public, claiming that the Prime Minister hides behind an offshore company, because if this was to be true then justice would have to act immediately based on the evidence you offer to present when making such a statement. It is as if I was to claim that you Mr Shehaj are a wanted person under an international warrant. But I have to present evidence to support such a claim.
You mentioned the names of some individuals, but I don’t know any of them and I have never met any of them. No matter how surprised you are. I haven’t met any of them at all. I don’t mind acknowledging that I have met him or her if I have done so, because it doesn’t matter whether you meet or you don’t meet someone, but it matters what you do with the person you meet up with.
And since I took the floor, earlier I took some notes from the remarks of the previous speakers and I listened very carefully to what Mr Xhelal said.
I listened very carefully to him, because despite our very different and the opposition positions, I think he is one of a few lawmakers on your side with a certain competence to talk about public works, because he has actually delivered on several public works. This is true. And since he has done something, you showed appreciation to him by removing him. However, this is up to you.
Mr Xhelal, I will provide some figures, because nobody else can better understand than you what the construction sites of the public works are. All they know is to launch a vulgar propaganda claiming about the construction costs and major infrastructure projects. One cannot guess and speculate over the costs of this or that road infrastructure project, because in order for one to render an opinion one has to look into the design and the project as a whole first. One cannot measure one km of road as the measure of the terylene fabric.
The same goes for the complete deadlines of a certain project, when one should again render an opinion on a concrete design whether the project is on schedule or delayed. And I am citing one of the largest public projects ever implemented in the United States of America.
You are probably aware of it, but it is also good for the public to know and it helps this debate. The project in question kicked off in 1982, whereas the design, the entire designing and tender procedures lead to the opening of the construction site in 1991.
The project cost for the project set to complete in 1998 was estimated at $7.4 billion for 272 km, of which 260 km of railway and 12 km of a road.
Boston’s famous Big Dig project in the U.S. was scheduled to complete in 1998, with an estimated project cost of $7.4 billion, but it completed in December 2007 and the total cost rose to a whopping amount of $21.5 billion.
So, it kicked off in 1982 and completed in 2007. This means that a project’s time scale and the reasons when a project is delayed continuously should be seen at the project itself, instead of jumping to unfounded conclusions without taking the trouble to analyze the project, and when it comes to the supposed cost per kilometre, I think everyone has already realized that all the tempest about the New Ring Road project was just a tempest in the teapot, because it is not about the cost per kilometre along a straight line, but the project includes numerous tunnels, overpasses, underpasses, entrance and exits etc.
Just for everyone to know, the project in question is not supervised by us, is not supervised by the government agencies and structures. The project is supervised by a company picked by the Islamic Development Bank, which has provided the loan. It has allocated the initial funding and their supervisor, who is not Albanian, has conducted a thorough audit before allocating additional loans. It is an international company selected by the Bank.
It is impossible for us to go there and ask them to simply give away some more tens of millions and they open the bank counters and grant us whatever we wish for and then ask again for some more millions.
How can one possibly think that this can be done this way? And that road, like every other road project that you abandoned – I mean not you personally, but the political party you represent – are the most meaningful embodiment of how projects shouldn’t be done, how a haphazardly launched project turns out to be much more expensive.
Private companies are the ones that build roads and they are supervised by a structure called the Albanian Road Authority and what the government does is that it sets priorities, defines the budget according to the requirements and the responsibilities are then divided.
I have happened to hear you reiterating that the Municipality of Tirana allocates payments to a person who is wanted by justice. However, you claim that this is not the case with the other two. You say this is not happening with the other two projects. But why is it so? This is because there is a court and prosecution office ruling and therefore the waste treatment in Elbasan is now a public property.
In other words, the claims that the amount of EUR 450 million has evaporated is pure fantasy. Nothing has been misused. Instead, the funding is still there as the waste treatment plant in Elbasan is already a public property. It has been returned to the public. The plant in the city of Fier has been sequestered and will definitely be transferred to the public, whereas Tirana pays for the service and keeping Tirana clean comes at a cost! One of the things I was told by almost all participants in the EU-Western Balkans Summit in Tirana, the Italian Prime Minister the first one, was: “Tirana is surprisingly clean.” Do you want to test it? It is a test we actually can’t conduct, because it would be at the expense of the whole public. Do you want to put it to the test? Do you want us to freeze payments for three days only and see what would then happen in Tirana? Because a daily waste collection and treatment operation takes place there.
These are very simple truths and levelling all sorts of accusations and uttering the most abusive words here won’t help the opposition and won’t make the opposition stronger.
It is not an abusive word to raise the dilemma whether you are really an idiot or pretend to be so. The most abusive word is to call someone “a thief”, especially when you do that in the hall of parliament. However, strangely enough you are not impressed by the abusive words, because you use them on a daily basis. You use the word “thief” a lot more than the normal greetings you send in a week. This is abnormal and, in the end of the day, it is the facts that speak for themselves.
If this was to be a regime or an absolute captured power, as you put it, then no investigations were to take place, nobody was to be arrested and nobody would have been facing justice by now, but everything would have been blocked. Fortunately, this is not the case and that’s why there is nothing I can do against you and anyone else, because I am tired of winning the defamation trials against you/
What should I do? Should I refer you to the court now? Should I take you to the court and ask you to present evidence about my imaginary offshore company and if you fail to do so then face legal consequences? Why should I deal with it for two or three years in a court case about something you are pretty aware that you know nothing about, just like I know this is merely a heinous defamation? But you dare make such statements and allege that “I hide behind an offshore company.”
/u.sh/
