How to Get Rid of a Kingmaker
On October 21, 2024, former Prime Minister, former Minister, former Speaker of Parliament, former President, and current leader of the Freedom Party Ilir Meta is arrested on charges of money laundering, passive corruption, and hiding of assets. The Special Prosecution against Corruption and Organized Crime (SPAK) dossier in which Meta and his ex-wife, former leader of the Socialist Movement for Integration (LSI), and Member of Parliament Monika Kryemadhi have been implicated results from a sprawling investigation into the former national energy distribution company ÇEZ, a series of contracts between Meta’s party LSI (rebranded in 2022 as Freedom Party) and two US lobbying firms involving a Greek shell company, and dubious transactions for expensive clothes, trips, schooling, real estate, and medical procedures.
In order to understand the rise and fall of Meta and Kryemadhi as political power couple, which forms the backdrop of SPAK’s detailed description of how a complex network of political, personal, and business interests is held together by bribery, fraud, and corruption, we need to travel back to 2009. During the parliamentary elections that year, the rightwing coalition headed by Sali Berisha’s Democratic Party (PD) was one seat short of a majority, and now Meta, a former Prime Minister, found himself in the attractive position of kingmaker. Loathe to collaborate with the Socialist Party (PS), which he had left in 2004, Meta helped the PD to a majority, and in return became Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister. The opposition, led by Edi Rama’s Socialist Party (PS), claimed widespread voter fraud.
Simmering tensions between the government and opposition came to a head when on January 11, 2011 Top Channel broadcast hidden camera footage from 2010 showing conversations in which Minister of Foreign Affairs Meta asked then Minister of Economy Dritan Prifti to intervene in various concession tenders and official appointments in return for bribes. Though initially denying the accusations, Meta resigned from office, but the public release of the video footage spurred a massive anti-government protest led by Rama on January 21. The ensuing clashes on Tirana’s Boulevard of the Martyrs of the Nation between protestors and the Republic Guard defending the Prime Ministry resulted in the death of four protestors.
Meta’s parliamentary immunity was removed in February 2011, but he was eventually acquitted by the High Court from bribery and abuse of power based on dubious claims by Albanian experts that Prifti’s video has been altered by software, despite foreign expert reports that the video was authentic. Both the protestors’ deaths and Meta’s corruption case were conveniently forgotten when Rama did a 180 and his PS joined Meta’s LSI in a pre-electoral coalition for the 2013 parliamentary elections. They won. Meta confirmed his position as kingmaker and found himself now to be Speaker of Parliament.
In the same year that Meta entered the government under Prime Minister Berisha as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, 2009, the Czech energy company ČEZ entered the Albanian energy market by acquiring a majority position in Albania’s national energy distributor, rebranded as ÇEZ Shpërndarje. During the negotiations, Meta presented his friend and businessman Kastriot Ismailaj to ÇEZ Shpërndarje CEO Jozef Hejsek as a trustworthy ally of the Albanian government and recommended him as a partner in recuperating the ballooning number of “bad debts,” i.e., overdue energy bills. In return, Ismailaj reportedly promised Meta €1.5 million and his support during the 2011 local elections.
On September 1, 2010, Hejsek signed a debt collection contract with Ismailaj’s company Debt International Advisory (DIA). DIA had no prior experience in this field of business and had, in fact, been established only a month earlier in Albania as a subsidiary of Debt International Advisory Ltd, itself founded on July 5, 2010 in the British Virgin Islands, a well-known tax haven.
On September 17, Meta took over from Prifti as Minister of Economy and as such became the representative of the government’s 24% share in ÇEZ Shpërndarje on its Oversight Board. Despite the fact that the Board had not ratified the contract with DIA and no real debt collection work had even begun, Ismailaj promptly started to issue fraudulent invoices that were equally promptly paid by Hejsek, to the total tune of nearly 650 million lekë (€4.6 million in 2010). By means of fictitious invoices, these proceeds subsequently flowed to a number of other companies linked to Meta and the LSI. Meta frequently asked Ismailaj for money, reportedly demanding €10 million from him and ÇEZ.
Meta and Ismailaj also intervened at the Energy Regulatory Authority (ERE) in order to lower the price of electricity bought by ÇEZ. Ismailaj reportedly paid ERE Board members €500,000 to vote in favor of the price reduction, and Meta subsequently demanded an additional €5 million from ÇEZ via Ismailaj for the reduction he helped negotiate as minister. As with the fraudulent invoices sent by DIA, the main victim of this fraudulent scheme was, as always, the Albanian taxpayer.
Ismailaj also started to accompany Meta on foreign trips as representative of the Ministry of Economy and often attended ÇEZ Board meetings and other official and unofficial meetings at the Ministry of Economy, but all these activities came abruptly to a halt when Meta resigned as minister in January 2011 because of the hidden camera scandal.1
Another relationship that turned out to be very profitable for Meta and Kryemadhi was with Albania’s wealthiest oligarch and owner of a sprawling business empire, Samir Mane. The SPAK dossier documents their first interactions in 2006, when Meta and Kryemadhi sold a holiday house in Qerret that they had bought in 2002 for $60,000 to Samir Mane for $300,000. Mane made the payment in cash, and none of couple’s official wealth declarations of the following years reflect the transaction.2
In exchange for Mane’s continued support, Kryemadhi used her political influence to solve Mane’s business problems. The SPAK dossier lists several instances, for example when Kryemadhi solves the tax issues of telecommunications company Plus, of which Mane is a shareholder, or when she intervenes on Mane’s behalf at the Bailiff’s Office of Tirana in a case involving his mining company Albchrome, or when she communicates with him about his preferred amendments to the Law for Mines. Despite the extensively documented communication between Kryemadhi and Mane in the SPAK dossier, Mane declares that “he has never asked for any help” from either Meta or Kryemadhi.
For this “non-existent” help, there was, however, some really existent compensation: Meta and Kryemadhi’s children joined Samir Mane’s wife Eva on an expensive trip to Disneyland Paris and a Beyoncé concert. Mane also offered them real estate property in one of the many projects developed by his company ManeTCI, taking into account Meta’s request for a “hammam and sauna.” In 2014, they settled on Villa 103 in Rolling Hills Luxury Residences outside Tirana. Kryemadhi had already engaged an architect and workers for the remodeling, when the work was abruptly halted after they got spooked by the fact that news of their reconstruction work had already reached the ears of the Greek ambassador. Mane declares that he had “no knowledge” of the remodeling work and “doesn’t remember” whether he ever met Meta or Kryemadhi for lunch or dinner.
“I will go to jail for everyone.” – Speaker of Parliament Ilir Meta, 2016.
In the meantime, however, foreign officials had become increasingly weary about Meta’s persistence in the Albanian political landscape. In particular Donald Lu, who arrived in Tirana as the new US ambassador in January 2015, was eager to catch “big fish” as a sign of the success of the Justice Reform. In one of the first dinners he held with various Albanian political powerbrokers, he reportedly asked the direct question, “How do I get rid of Ilir Meta?”
In a letter sent to the US House Subcommittee on Europe, then General Prosecutor Adriatik Llalla confirmed Lu’s intent to get Meta arrested. In his letter, he recounted how during a meeting in May 2015, Lu tried to pressure him into arresting Meta because of his perceived obstruction of the Justice Reform and the many corruption affairs the US Embassy had information on.3
No doubt in an attempt to counteract the pressure from the US State Department on the Albanian government to arrest him, Meta signed a series of lobbying contracts with two US-based firms, Global Security and Innovative Strategies (GSIS) and McKeon Group in 2016 and 2017. Neither of these contracts nor the origin of the funds used to pay for them was declared at the Albanian Central Election Committee (KQZ).
From February 2016 until April 2017, GSIS organized a series of meetings between Meta and US government officials including from the State Department, services for which LSI paid $463,546 while declaring only $93,761 at the KQZ. McKeon Group organized Meta’s visit to the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the newly elected Congress in January 2017. The contract covered 6 months à $15,000 per month. Subsequently, LSI contracted McKeon through a Greek shell company, for 2 months à $50,000 per month. None of these payments could be traced back to LSI, but SPAK argues these were covered by companies that profited from favors secured by Meta and Kryemadhi.
In the months preceding the 2017 parliamentary elections, the political situation continued to deteriorate, and in February the opposition members from the Democratic Party vacated their parliamentary mandates, starting a months-long protest in front of the Prime Ministry. After intense international pressure and the intervention of numerous US and EU officials, Prime Minister Rama and PD leader Lulzim Basha concluded the so-called McAllister+ agreement on May 18. This agreement, among other things, installed a technical PS–LSI–PD government that would prepare for elections in June and establish the vetting bodies to get the Justice Reform on the rails.
Significantly, the McAllister+ agreement precluded the formation of pre-electoral coalitions. This prohibition on pre-electoral coalitions was an attempt by the PD and PS to crush the smaller political parties, and prevent the LSI from once again being in the lucrative position of kingmaker. The ploy succeeded, and after the elections Rama’s PS was able to form a majority government without the LSI. The opposition claimed widespread voter fraud.
Meta had by then already been politically weakened. In the weeks preceding the final McAllister+ agreement between PD and PS, Parliament had started the procedure to elect a new president, now that the term of then President Bujar Nishani had come to an end. With the PD absent from parliament and after three rounds without a single candidate for the presidency, the PS pressured the LSI into agreeing to a candidate, lest they would elect one of their own accord. Under pressure, the LSI proposed its own leader, Meta, in a bargain that would maintain his immunity but removed him from the impending electoral campaign. Meta was duly elected President in the fourth round of voting on April 28, 2017 and assumed office on July 24. Kryemadhi took over as head of the LSI.
Left outside government, and with its founder safely stored away in the largely ceremonial role of president, LSI struggled to sustain its political–economical model, which was largely predicated on the party leadership’s ability to secure government contracts for supporters or nominate them to government jobs, as described in some detail above. But without access to executive power, this edifice quickly started to crumble. And in the 2021 parliamentary elections, the LSI dropped from 19 to 4 seats.
In May 2022, the Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung first published claims that Meta would have used a shell company, Dorelita Ltd, to funnel $700,000 to a US lobbying firm in order to secure his attendance at the inauguration of President Donald Trump in January 2017. A spokesperson for then President Meta claimed this was all “defamation” and “slander,” but in July Meta’s term as president was over, and with that his immunity from criminal investigation. SPAK launched its investigation a month later.
Meta is currently in pretrial detention.
The Albanian Mechanism is part of Manifesto GREAT WAVE.
On October 28, 2011, ÇEZ Shpërndarje requested the cancellation of the contract with DIA, upon which Ismailaj filed a case at the Vienna International Arbitral Centre (VIAC). In 2014, the mother company ČEZ reached a settlement with the Albanian government for €95.5 million for its shares and withdrew from the Albanian market. ÇEZ Shpërndarje was then rebranded as the public company Electric Energy Distribution Operator (OShEE).
In May 2015, Ismailaj was arrested and in 2017 convicted for fraud and money laundering by the Regional Court in Tirana to 11 years in prison, which was confirmed in 2018 by the Tirana Appeals Court. Even in prison, Ismailaj continued to receive demands from Meta for money for his electoral campaign. Ismailaj was eventually released in September 2023.
Mane subsequently sold the villa in 2020 to Kosovar journalist Baton Haxhiu for €80,000 as “a thank you for all the help he had given him with solving his business problems in Kosovo and North Macedonia.” The interesting question is, of course, how a journalist could help an oligarch with “business problems”!
After Llalla sent his letter to US Congress, Lu increased his public attacks on him as a General Prosecutor “that doesn’t criminally prosecute anyone.” Lu also supported the questionable election of Arta Marku as “temporary” General Prosecutor in December 2017 stating that her predecessor “who refused to prosecute politicians” was now gone. But when another “big fish,” Prime Minister Edi Rama’s right hand and Minister of Interior Saimir Tahiri was arrested in 2018, Lu remained uncharacteristically mum.