Prime Minister Edi Rama’s remarks at today’s parliament session:

 I decided to take the floor as I happen to come across and hear a figure like the ones you constantly make up, suggesting that “the government has to pay a bill of 385 million euros because of arbitrage court rulings.” Where did this bill come from? If you are to show us the factual bill and not mere guesses or guesses-based conclusions, we would be ready to sit and discuss it. However, you can’t claim and tell the public that the government is allegedly paying a bill of 385 million euros because of the arbitrage court decisions.

The government, although you have all repeatedly claimed, and probably you personally too – I am not sure about it yet you have all repeatedly claimed that the government was paying “great con artist” like the one you named to fool people and confuse them ahead of the parliamentary elections last year, yet I am repeating not a single penny has been paid out to either Bechetti or anyone else to date.

I have heard you repeat insistently that we are supposedly imposing a higher personal income tax rate or higher tax on labour than on the capital and that Albania currently applies the highest personal income tax rate in the region. Totally the opposite is true and this is a matter of tangible figures and data and not a matter of opinions.

Albania applies the lowest personal income tax in the region, currently at a maximum rate of 5.5%. Albania also applies the lowest tax rates in the region. This is a fact. No country in the region applies a zero tax rate on small businesses; no other country in the region applies zero VAT rate on the small businesses; no other country in the region applies a zero rate of personal income tax on monthly wages up to 400,000 lek. Not only that, but the government will soon or in a matter of few days forward the proposal to apply zero income tax rate on monthly wages of up to 500.000 lek, a move that goes beyond our pledge to just halve the personal income tax rate on salaries of up to 500.000 lek . No country in the region has such low tax rates. How come that you claim that we have imposed the highest tax rates?

Here it is a chart on employment and it is not drawn by the Albanian government. Regardless of all the speculations one can make about unemployment, the professional skilled or unskilled workers, I know that when we took office a total of 349,000 registered employees had a job in the Republic of Albania. And what I know now is that the number of registered employees has jumped to over 707,000 from only 349,000 and 523,000 of them work in the private sector.

Likewise, the monthly salary in the private sector has increased by 10.5% in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period of the previous year, whereas the average inflation rate in the first three months was around 4.43%.