How to Spend €10 Million on Cookies and Chocolate
In September 2025, when presenting his fourth consecutive government, Prime Minister Edi Rama managed to capture the fleeting attention of the international media cycle by announcing somewhat of a novum: a tricked-out chatbot called “Diella” officially appointed as Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence and reported to be “the world’s first AI minister.” According to Rama, Diella would ensure that Albania became “a country where public tenders are 100% free of corruption.” As it turns out, she indeed may have.
Diella operates as part of the government’s e-Albania digital services platform, managed by the National Agency for Information Society (AKShI), which former Deputy Prime Minister Arben Ahmetaj called “Rama’s private playground.” AKShI, which falls directly under the Prime Ministry, has been essential to the influence the government exercises over the Albanian (social) media landscape, for example, by banning access to the social media platform TikTok during the previous electoral cycle and assisting in the surreptitious implementation of Israeli spyware. Through AKShI, Rama is able to directly manage the internet access and content within Albania, with very little public oversight.
Yet we haven’t heard much from Diella and its innovative AI-driven corruption-prevention strategies in recent weeks, because on December 16, 2025, AKShI director Mirlinda Karçanaj was arrested by the National Bureau of Investigation (BKH), indicted together with several other officials and businessmen on charges of corruption, money laundering, kidnapping, and membership of a criminal organization, among other crimes. She has since been placed under house arrest.
Karçanaj is a long-term collaborator of Rama, first appearing on the radar as Director of IT at the Municipality of Tirana from 2007–2011, when Rama was mayor. She followed Rama after his electoral victory in 2013 to the national stage and became the director of AKShI in October of the same year. In 2017, AKShI was placed under direct control of the Prime Ministry and its budget subsequently skyrocketed.
The dossier of the Anti-Corruption Prosecution (SPAK) that eventually led to the indictment of Karçanaj and her associates late last year has its origins in a series of seemingly unrelated police reports and investigations dating back to 2023: the discovery of an organized crime group engaged in contraband and smuggling; a drugs trafficking case from Italy; the kidnapping of an Albanian citizen; and corruption and money laundering involving tender procedures at AKShI. As the links between these different cases became increasingly apparent, they were collated into a single, sprawling investigation, of which the present case is only the first component. According to SPAK, Karçanaj and her associates
organized and implemented a scheme to predetermine the winners of procurement procedures under the aegis of AKShI, with the aim of illegally profiting from public funds resulting from payments linked to those procured public contracts. This scheme comprises the illegal determination of competition criteria for procurement procedures, which were imposed with the aim of excluding certain economic operators from the bidding process and the predetermination of the winner by finding different reasons to disqualify [the others].
So far, this is scheme is quite similar to the one deployed by Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Balluku and her collaborators at the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure. The difference, however, is that SPAK was also able to evidence the violence that essential to make such a scheme works in practice:
Against disqualified economic operators who pursued their rights by filing complaints at the Contracting Authority and the Public Procurement Commission, they used violence and illegal deprivation of freedom to force them to withdraw from their complaints, as well as any procedure they had taken part in, with the aim of securing the continuation of said scheme.
In fact, the dossier contains a detailed victim report of an IT businessman who had lodged complaints in multiple procurement procedures, and as a result was kidnapped one day by a person dressed up in the uniform of the BKH. The businessman was put in handcuffs, hooded, and whisked off to a village near Elbasan, where the kidnappers acquired access to his mobile phone and demanded that he collaborate or be shot. Still confused about the reasons for his abduction, the businessman asked exactly what he was supposed to collaborate with, and was then shown a list with seven AKShI tenders. “Do you get it now?” his kidnappers asked him. “These are tenders where you complained at and you got to withdraw. We don’t care about your money, we know you have it, have fun with it, but you’ve got no deal with these procedures and you’ll withdraw from them.”
The victim was forced to call the administrator of the company and had all complaints withdrawn on the spot. A collaborating member of the procurement commission then confirmed the company’s withdrawal in the IT system. As they drove the businessman back, his kidnappers told him: “Don’t cause us any problems, I don’t want any police reports from you, otherwise we’ll kill you, your wife, your sister, and your mother, since you don’t have a father.”
All tender procedures from which the abducted businessman was forced to withdraw involved companies linked to a single businessman: Ermal Beqiri, who has now been indicted in the same case. In fact, the SPAK dossier contains evidence from several video recordings made by another businessman called Ergys Agasi in his office, of meetings between himself, Karçanaj, and Beqiri, expressing concerns about the tenders involving the company of the businessman who was later abducted at the behest of Agasi.
The mechanism that Karçanaj, Beqiri, and Agasi had set up was as follows. Beqiri had an IT company, Soft & Solution, that bid on tenders issued by Karçanaj’s AKShI. The price of these tenders was artificially inflated and the bidding rigged, such that Beqiri’s company would come out as winning bidder. Agasi’s fictional company EA Solution, which rented its office space, IT infrastructure, and personnel from Soft & Solution, would then issue fake invoices to the latter company to funnel the inflated surplus on the AKShI contracts away. Beqiri got to run his successful IT company, Agasi took the cake.
“The project is 2 million, we’ll make it 4.”
– Ergys Agasi on artifically inflating the value of an AKShI tender.
From 2023–2025, the value of the fictional invoices issued by EA Solution to Soft & Solution alone amounted to more than €1 million. And this was only one of the channels through which the criminal group profited from public funds meant for public contracts pertaining to the e-Albania service platform, data centers, computer systems for the State Police, Treasury, and prisons, advanced digital security and communications systems, and so on. Through a similar construction, EA Solution issued fictional invoices to another company, Fastech, for more than €23 million. Moreover, EA Solution was not the only end point of the seemingly endless cash flow from AKShI contracts to the criminal group. Both Soft & Solution and Fastech were also involved with a food import company, reportedly paying fake invoices amounting to €10 million for “cookies and chocolate.”
The control over the AKShI tender procedures appeared to have been fully in the hands of Karçanaj as director of the institution and her deputy. In particular, AKShI arbitrarily determined certain contracts to be “classified,” so as to require specific security clearances. This then allowed the summary disqualification of any bidder that didn’t have those. SPAK concludes that Karçanaj, Agasi, Beqiri, and their collaborators had “all procurement procedures fully under control, from the moment of drafting the terms of reference, specific qualification criteria, market analysis, and declaration of the winning bidder.” In doing so, they “fictitiously ‘inflated’ the maximum budget, potentially causing considerable financial damage to the state budget, concretely by seeking the procurement of appliances with a price several times higher then their market value.”
Even so, many questions remain open. By what mechanism was Karçanaj remunerated for her role in the corruption scheme? How did the money end up from Agasi’s companies into his own pockets? What was that money subsequently used for? Was this the only scheme or were there other criminal groups deploying similar procurement fund pipelines? All these and many other issues remain to be clarified.
Even though the SPAK investigation into the AKShI corruption scheme by itself raises all kinds of concerning questions with regard to the quality and stability of the core IT infrastructure systems of Albania, which were provided by companies which were not necessarily the best qualified to do so, it also significantly increases the exposure of the Prime Minister himself.
Both the indictment of Mayor of Tirana Erion Veliaj and Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Belinda Balluku have been a major hit to his inner circle, and there continues to be a considerable risk that either one at some point may choose to turn over evidence against Rama in order to reduce their sentence, if they have not already done so. An additional, serious risk may lie in the information that Agasi, who is still at large, has at his disposal.
From the SPAK investigation we learn – nearly as an afterthought – that Agasi had previously been in contact with former Socialist MP Alqi Bllako, who has been convicted in the context of the corruption scandal with the Tirana waste incinerator. The dossier contains text messages between Agasi and Bllako in which the former threatens “to send some guys over” to former Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Damian Gjiknuri because of alleged obstruction of his criminal activities. Similary, it provides tentative evidence of Agasi’s links with Çopja criminal group, which was recently successfully targeted by SPAK. In other words, Agasi emerges from the dossier as a figure interconnecting several of the large corruption and mafia cases that the investigations of the BKH and SPAK have brought to light in recent years, giving some credence to former Deputy Prime Minister Ahmetaj’s claim during a RAI3 interview last year that Agasi is the “coordinator of all [criminal] groups” on behalf of Prime Minister Rama.
The AKShI corruption dossier only contains a fraction of the total amount of the information that SPAK has gathered from searching the premises of Agasi’s company. In particular, the reportedly 130 video recordings he made in his office are likely to be a veritable goldmine for further investigations and pose a tangible risk to the upper echelons of the government, Socialist Party, and business and criminal milieus of Albania.
With multiple (former) Socialist ministers and mayors in pretrial detention or imprisoned, and the directors of several other key institutions such as the Albanian Road Authority (ARrSh), the Albanian Power Corporation (KESh), and now AKShI all under house arrest, at some point you run out of high officials to indict and convict. Some time in the near future, perhaps after a few more ministers have presented themselves to SPAK for questioning and arrest, the only reasonable person left for SPAK to indict is the one person who ought to be eventually held accountable for this disastrous state of affairs: the Prime Minister himself.
Indeed, all of the recent SPAK investigations have expanded its attack surface on the highest office of the country. The EU accession process – for now – holds Rama in check with regard to any legal changes that might jeopardize SPAK’s capabilities in this regard, but as the net tightens, more and more will come to depend on that diplomatic pressure alone.
The Albanian Mechanism is part of Manifesto.