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PD: Reconstruction funds in Durrës as a blackmail tool for vote manipulation in the 2025 elections

2024-10-22 14:10:00, Politikë CNA

PD: Reconstruction funds in Durrës as a blackmail tool for vote

The spokesperson of the Democratic Party, Florjana Garo, stated in a statement to the media that although 5 years have passed since the earthquake of November 26, 2019, the reconstruction tenders in the municipality of Durrës continue.

According to Garo, the reconstruction funds in Durrës are being used as a tool to manipulate the 2025 elections.

Florjana Garo's statement

Five years have passed since the earthquake of November 26, 2019 and the 2025 elections are approaching, but the reconstruction tenders in the municipality of Durrës continue.

Thus, on September 16, the Municipality of Durrës opened the tender with the object "Structural rehabilitation of Palace no. 15, Abaz Çelkupa Street 15", Region 3 as part of the Reconstruction Program.

The tender worth 800 million lek was won by the merger of the companies EURONDERTIMI 2000 shpk & EVERESTshpk & SHEHU -2AB Konstruksion shpk. According to Open Data Albania, this tender has a red flag for lack of competition. So Eurondrëtim, Everest and Shehu-2AB were predetermined to win the tender, as the only companies in the competition.

But corrupt tenders and theft of public funds are not the object of this statement. In hundreds of cases, the Anti-Corruption Department of the Democratic Party has denounced in detail the hundreds of millions of abuses of this Municipality within the reconstruction process.

The question is: are and are the reconstruction funds being used as a means of blackmailing citizens during electoral campaigns and before the elections?

The tender opened 8 months before the elections of 2025 by the Municipality of Durrës, even though 5 years have passed since the earthquake, does not prove incompetence, but the greed and greed of the Renaissance officials to use the reconstruction funds for electoral purposes.

Open Data Albania has researched the distribution of individual grants for the Reconstruction Program after the Earthquake, in ordinary months during the period 2020-2023, and also in the months part of the Election Campaigns.

Families damaged by the earthquake were expected to benefit from the reconstruction grant, but a week before the 2021 elections, the Municipality of Durrës changed its strategy, transferring the reconstruction fund to citizens' bank accounts.

A clear attempt to influence citizens electorally, i.e. a way of buying and manipulating the vote.

Durrës Municipality transferred in April 2021 over 792 million ALL individual grants for light reconstructions in apartments, thus violating the Electoral Code.

Even though the fantastic sum of 267.8 million euros was withdrawn from the Reconstruction Fund, quite a few citizens of Durrës received straw keys instead of house keys.

In this long struggle, sometimes with a rental bonus and sometimes without it, sometimes in hotels and sometimes in rented houses, some of those who lost their homes in the earthquake 5 years ago, have the last hope left for the spring elections next.

The fund provided in September for the preferred firms of the socialist mayor, aims to give the keys to the residents of Abaz Çelkupa Street and ask them to vote.

For Edi Rama and Emirjana Sakon, the disaster of 2019 was an opportunity to financially reward the gangs of Durrës, who helped them during the elections, and to use the reconstruction and its funds to buy and steal the votes of the homeless.

The reluctance or plan of SPAK not to investigate millions of euros of Reconstruction funds, in Durres and throughout Albania, is another favor given to Rama's corrupt government and a concession to the criminalization of the country./ CNA