Speech of Prime Minister Edi Rama in Parliament:

 

I was impressed by the speech of the previous speaker on foreign investments, and by his crocodile tears for the entrepreneur who became the news of the last few days because of the violence inflicted upon him.

First, according to the budget of payments, foreign investments amounted to 261 million euros in the second quarter, which means the highest amount of the three quarter in the last three years in terms of money injected directly into the economy thanks to foreign investment. But this is what happens when you neither read nor understand. Your time is dead, Sali. Get over it, for anytime you recall your time, you take us on a visit to the cemetery of your memories. Keep those memories for yourself, and recite them in front of the mirror. Whereas today, the entrepreneur who left looks in the mirror the wounds of the system you built.

The truth is that the entrepreneur came to my office, after we took office, and explained me from A to Z the whole ordeal of delays and nightmares going on for years when it was impossible for him to find a solution to problems that were only administrative. Just as he noted in the statement he released, our government solved all his problems one by one. After all the administrative problems were solved, there is a judge who all of a sudden “bashes him up” because in the most abusive and unimaginable way proclaims the entire investment area into a property, and she did this in July this year, and this was the cause of the outbreak of the conflict.

Those who beat him were empowered by your courts and your judges, Sali, and by the justice system you built altogether. That same system which we want to overthrow with the justice reform, not only on paper, as soon as possible, and with the vetting process, so that the judge who returned the property with the motivation that those who took it have reaped the grass there, and all the others like her will be accountable.

This is the truth, if you want to know the truth!

I won’t discuss here what has been said, discussed and conveyed in the media about the judge and the strands of dark interests that bind the decision of the judge with the grass reapers and with you who have exhausted all the slanders but have never had the courage to come up here and defend him. First!

No to talk about someone who is massacred, not by those who beat him – they were just the weapon, the hand who beat him was the judge – means that you’re really blind if you don’t understand where the roots of this story are.

It’s very easy to stand up today and point an accusation finger, no matter who you are, towards this government, but this government has the responsibility and the burden to deal every day, not only with building the future, but also with the price of the area where they operate. This is one of your mines that your power placed and which exploded at the feet of that entrepreneur. Suffice it to refer to the facts, and the facts speak very clearly.

I feel sorry for the MP who spoke earlier, coming up here and reciting lies and slanders, shamelessly pointing an accusation finger towards the government for what happened there. You have to ask yourself just one thing. How come that an entrepreneur is barbarized, and Sali speaks about anything, promotes any digital slanderer on the digital wall-posters, but doesn’t say a word about the one who is barbarized?

This is because Sali has a reason not to speak. The entrepreneur wasn’t beaten by the business climate created by the government, and neither by visible and invisible interests of this government, but he was beaten by the judge who in July this year delivered a sentence that is one of the biggest scandals in the history of abuse of law in Albania. The grass reaper becomes an owner and is returned the property where the investment was supposed to be made, and this once-grass reaper now revolted owner is entitled to attack the entrepreneur.

He is a victim of the justice system you built, and has nothing to do either with the government or the will of the government to support foreign investors. In relation to this, you can read the statement made by the investor, and see what he says about the relation with this government. This government untied one by one all the knots your government had tied, and due to which he was blocked for many years. Actually, he had all the documentation available to start work but all of a sudden, after all his problems are solved, there’s a judge, whom Sali knows very well, and who dealt with the present case in the exact same manner Sali’s power used to deal with properties.

In terms of foreign investments, don’t confuse the status of the strategic investor with foreign investments, for this is ridiculous. The status of the strategic investor is a very special status, granted by a special law. The fact that there are two people, two companies, two entities who receive that status does not mean that two foreign investors have come to Albania. Refer to the budget of payments, refer to the figures of the quarters, and you will see that in the second quarter we have had in Albania the highest level of foreign investment, 261 million. You who take the trouble to judge the government and see it according to what you wish you were, you received the answer in Dibër, and wait for it again next June, for you will have an answer even more spectacular than the one you received in Dibër, region by region, from Kukes to Vlore.

Since I’m not a Facebook follower of yours Sali, I didn’t read your status on the entrepreneur, whereas your oratory in his regard proved to me once again that you are able to kill somebody at night and cry them the next day like nobody else. Everything you told about the process measures up to the height of your authority as a slanderer. You talked a lot about your favourite topic, drugs, and honestly you seem to me like the governor of the “bank of Lazarat” in migration. I’d recommend you to watch the latest movie on Pablo Escobar because when you called upon the Euro-Atlantic alliance, you looked precisely like Pablo Escobar who called upon the free world to protect his family, before he ended up caught by the police.

I’m not talking ISIS with you because I don’t have the slightest doubt that if between Trump and you, I choose you, between me and ISIS you choose ISIS. You call upon the world, whereas the eyes of the world are here. It’s not that the world doesn’t see, doesn’t follow and doesn’t know what’s going on here precisely with regard to an issue which, in an effort typical of yours and of your party, you’ve been trying to address since three years, believing that the more you repeat it, the more you attack police and the minister of Interior, the more you feed the public with this nonsense, the more the public will believe that this is true.

Fortunately, the parties involved in this story are not just you and us, but it is also the world you are calling upon, it’s the world that as never before, last year was granted the freedom to fly over the whole territory and monitor the cannabis plantations, and the technology which is much more advanced that the one of one year ago.

You urged the Italian police to bring the information here. Be patient a few more days. Guardia di Finanza has completed all the surveillance operations, and will make a public report. I agree very much with you, if the Speaker of Parliament takes the initiative, with the support of us all, to have the report of Guardia di Finanza shown here in this room. I believe that between the photocopies here speaking on your behalf, and the report of Guardia di Finanza, you agree that that report will be my point of reference when it comes to the objectivity of the situation.

You called upon the Euro-Atlantic alliance to protect Albania. From whom and through whom? The US State Department is one of the most powerful mechanisms within the Euro-Atlantic alliance, and before calling upon it, give an explanation, according the information you have received from your world of phantasy with the secret services, how come that the US State Department talks about “impressive results” in the reports of 2014 and 2015? I quote: “due to the commitment of the political leadership”. Either the US State Department has some lots here and has to protect them, or you, all of you, as the truth is, have locked yourselves in your lot which is getting smaller every month, and in 2017, when we measure it, you will see how much you have lost in relation to 2013.

I am willing that together we make an official effort, through the chairmanship of the Parliament and the speaker of Parliament, and have the report of Guardia di Finanza operation on the whole territory of Albania exposed here in this room, in order to end this endless history of slander, accusations, mud, endless exaggerations coming in most of the cases from the co-owners and the governor of the “bank of Lazarat”.

You wander around and show your photocopies. Just explain me this, how come that the Euro-Atlantic alliance, which Sali calls for help through its most powerful institution, the US Department of State, issues reports of which we are sincerely proud, whereas you should at least not speak. I’m not saying that you should congratulate us on the reports of the US Department of State, but from where do you get the courage to bomb people all day long with the drugs issue? Keep on turning the Democratic Party in a Nurihan, the old lady with the blanket, waiting for the Anglo-American landing to save Sali from me.

With regard to what you said about ARMO. Is there in the world a prime minister who, having ruled a government for eight years, doesn’t know the difference between a private company and a state company? I’m not going into what your government did to ARMO, which it turned into a skeleton. I’m simply saying: What are you talking about?

The Albanian government neither has had nor has any right on ARMO. Sali has sold all of its rights, and now he holds accountable our government. He sold them to the one he used to call Nastradin.

A company buried in debt with the banks, the banks being in danger by the company’s debts, foreign investors who could come at any time, who have come and gone but their issue was not with the government, but with the banks. The solution of the problem depended on the agreement between the investors and the banks. What does the government have to do with this? A private company in the hands of banks. Show us any paper proving that the government has ever intervened in this process, and tell us by which decision it did this.

The only thing we have been concerned since the first day, and which I am proud to say we have solved, was the fate of the 1200 families. The 1200 families that suffered the consequences of your decision, today are not only insured but they bring home a wage packet. I’ll be in Fier next week. You can join, or go there yourselves and face them. Tell them your fairy tales, the nonsense you tell Albanians every day. You cannot help but think about what you yourselves have done: theft.

Even with regard to drugs, you cannot help but show the great pain for losing “the bank of Lazarat”. You protect the official protectors of Lazarat. We have made the whole picture available for the Albanians to see, not only in relation to cannabis but in relation to every other deed, while you addressed cannabis in secret bulletins. Whereas you made secret bulletins, we transformed the police bulletins from secret to public. And there are also two maps of the Guardia di Finanza’s operation dating back to your time, which show that you didn’t have just Lazarat.

Lazarat was the bank, but it had branches across Albania. The hectares planted in 2013 by you, together with Gate and all the directors of the other branches of the bank are a record in Albania. And you come here and call to account and moralize.

We have never said, either I or we, that this is a problem. I have never said and neither am I saying today that we have neutralized this problem. But the war we have started against this phenomenon could not even be imagined until three years ago. You will see in the report of Guardia di Finanza how any detected plantations have been destroyed. Whereas you, according to the reports by Guardia di Finanza, in your best year have destroyed 7%. In 2012 you have destroyed 0%. You had 232 hectares in Lazarat.

I have another parenthesis. What are you going to tell high school graduates after you called upon them wailing? You did and said everything you could in those communication channels. How come that it happened exactly what we said? Only 1/4 of the quotas have been taken by the best, and the rest of the quotas are available for the others that, again, will be ranked according to the best among them.

However, we’ll wait for the process to be concluded, and you’ll see with your eyes the bill you will receive also for the high school graduates, for ARNO and for everything else in June 2017.

Let us now go back to the item on the agenda.

If we refer to the decision of three years ago, I’m telling you that if we went back there, I would do the same thing. This because of the very simple reason that everything was out of control, and the law did not guarantee the protection of Albania against dangerous waste. I’ve said here in this Parliament, don’t take Europe as an example but look at the fact that we don’t have any tool of control and law-enforcement.

I’ll explain what has happened both from a legal standpoint and from that of structure. In 2013, we didn’t have any kind of capacity in terms of infrastructure and human resources that could guarantee the law enforcement, and the law had many flaws in terms of control guarantees.

Whereas three years ago we didn’t have any single laboratory for this process, today we have a laboratory with the highest European standards certified by the European Union. Whereas in 2013, pursuant to the law, waste could enter our country through any customs office, and we know what customs office in 2013 were like, today the law makes it clear that waste enters only through three customs offices which have a full control capacity.

Today, we don’t have only a modern laboratory, invested by the European Union, which enables the whole control and the physical, chemical and microbiological analysis of any material entering Albania, but we have also a team of people trained by the European Union. A whole program of the European Union has been made operational only to increase physical and human capacities in this field.

Another very important element. If you have a look at the current law and don’t take the opportunity to write the next “poem of misery”, thinking that you can fool Albanians, this law excludes every kind of waste because of the incineration, expect for the part in the list.

Every waste is imported only from the recycling industry, which today has 3,200 insured employees, and no one else has the right to make any kind of export from here there, or import from here. First of all, this measure is fully aligned with the EU directive, and second, it is fully aligned with our need to stimulate recycling now that we have complete control on the rest.

A conversation with the industry would suffice to you to understand the essence of this law and to understand that not only is this law threatening nothing, unlike the law of three years ago, but it stimulates the development of an industry to which the import of solid waste in the green list reduced to maximum is today essential. When you were struggling against this phenomenon in 2010, your list had 500 of them.

Today it is clear that hadn’t we made this intervention, the recycling industry would have failed, 3200 direct employees would have been left adrift – I’m not speaking about the indirect employees of this industry in the networks collecting recyclable waste – we wouldn’t have been in compliance with the European directive, and we would have closed a front of employment and environment cleaning.

The new measure we will take is the abolition of the 50 [new] ALL tax on every kg of plastics, which prevents further stimulation of domestic waste collection.

By removing the tax on domestic waste, the tax on waste from abroad, which is 100 [new] ALL per kg, will not be changed. And despite the tax on waste coming from abroad is twice the tax on domestic waste, there is no incentive and funding capacity for the internal network with the tax 50 ALL per kg.

By removing this tax and by leaving into force the tax on import, we will increase internal capacities, and will have in a three-period time a totally new picture of the capacity of this industry to recycle domestic waste. The industry cannot do this today because it has no interest, and the cost for the building up of the whole network, for collecting plastics, paper, etc., is still much higher than the profit if this tax is paid.

This law paves the way to give a necessary impetus to the industry. You look only at the plantations, but we are talking about an industry that in the last three years has been investing seriously in its infrastructure. There are in Albania waste processing plants certified by the European Union.

There is nothing more irresponsible than letting these factories close down because of this need. Nothing is more responsible than paving this way which today we have the opportunity to control, after having available what we have built in two and a half years.

Today we have available, also for the waste as for everything else in urban areas, the digital map of the physical, land and underground structure of our country. Thanks to the digital map of urban waste, which is one of tens of control maps of the territory, today we have a clear picture of everything that is in the territory of Albania in relation to waste.

Who dares take the floor – dare in relation to themselves, not to me, because when people transcend the relation with the mirror, they don’t mind becoming everybody’s fool, for having built Lazarat and talking today about the marijuana phenomenon as if it were up to you to free Albania, it’s a big masquerade – so, who dares come up here and recall the campaign for the waste of Elbasan, and look at it today?

Of course, there is also “Sharrë”. We aren’t claiming we have done it all because had we done it all, we wouldn’t be here dealing with you, and who knows where we would be solving problems around the world. We’re not magicians, but we have done what you can’t even think about. Every time you take the floor, just remember the mountain of dirt you left in Elbasan, was suffocating the old and the young every night, whereas today a whole forest is being planted. All the waste has been moved from there, and a model plant is being built, like it will be built in the other areas.