Law on tourist ports/ Rama: Poison was thrown, the alarm was raised in the EU as well

2026-04-20 20:05:00, Aktualitet CNA

Law on tourist ports/ Rama: Poison was thrown, the alarm was raised in the EU as

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, during a meeting in Tirana with representatives of the agritourism sector, accused the opposition of, as he put it, "exporting mud and poison" from Albania to European Union countries with the aim of attacking the government.

Rama referred specifically to the debate on changes to the law on tourist ports, saying that the Democratic Party of Albania had raised concerns at the international level, including the European Union, presenting the issue as problematic.

According to him, legal changes are necessary to avoid hindering investors from building tourism projects on the Albanian coast, especially when it comes to investments in private properties that include small piers or marinas.

"Investors are required to tender for specific parts of the project, such as the pier or marina, even when they have fully invested in the area," Rama said, considering this practice a bureaucratic obstacle that, according to him, slows down development.

He added that Albania has a significant lack of anchorage points for tourist ships, emphasizing that this is not only related to large marinas like those of Durrës or Vlora, but also to small ports that are missing along the entire coast.

Rama also criticized the political debates around the issue, describing them as distorted and harmful to the investment climate, while emphasizing that, according to him, the opposition has no connection with the administration of the state after long years out of government.

"First, I'm glad I explained the Mountains Package properly because we'll have to explain it very often, because there's a lot of "poison" that's thrown around here every day, as I believe you may have seen, you may not have seen, the idiotic resistance that was made to a very simple change for ports in parliament, to the point that the alarm was raised even in the European Union. It was taken from here to there, because at this point we are the first and I'm convinced, the last candidate country in the history of European Union enlargement, that we "export mud and poison" from our capital to other capitals and they were told that "the government is changing the law so that it will give the ports to the oligarchs without competition."

In fact, the change is necessary in order not to hinder and not to delay and drag out investors who invest in their properties on the coast, and come with a project that also has a pontoon or a small marina, and the answer they receive is: "you can get the permit for this other part, for the pontoon and for the marina a tender must be made". Because in the existing law, normally, since the sea is under the total administration of the state, for the tourist ports that it builds, that the government puts out to competition, there is a competition, while to tell the other that "you invest all this here, but for the parking, because the port is a parking lot for ships, we will have a competition for the parking", it is enough to create "war zones" between, let alone the one who makes the investment say "I am removing the pontoon altogether".

We are a country that has a very large deficiency with anchorage points at sea, very large. Others have hundreds and hundreds of ports, anchorage, and here we are not talking about ports like the Durrës Marina or the Vlora Marina, which are large tourist marinas. Here we are also talking about small ports and we are discussing this. So, everything is talked about in a negative way because they are not at fault, they are not at fault, it has been so many years that they have nothing to do with state affairs", said Rama./ CNA