Remarks by Prime Minister Edi Rama at today’s parliament session on the new Durres Tourist Port project, the biggest foreign investment in the region, designed to transform Durres into a beautiful gateway in the tourist Mediterranean and give Albania a huge fresh impetus towards delivering on its ambition to become a regional champion for tourism in the Balkans:
Let’s make it clear and set the record straight at the very beginning as to what we are talking about today! Current port resembles to a Medieval-era harbour, where chrome ore is traded right at the heart of the city of Durres, where rust coloured areas thrive and where dead sailing vessels are rotting, and where thousands of square meters covered by thorns and piles of rusted metal pieces, and the tourist city on the other side. When listening to your statements and watching these images, one figures out the reason why you are really concerned. And the reason is because you are precisely like these.
A commercial port with Adem Reka’s heroism-era cranes in service way too beyond their retirement age. As such, this port is an environmental scandal, a technological comatose, an urban wound dripping dirt over decades right in the center of gravity of Albania’s largest port, Durrës.
This remaining carcinogenic site is today’s interface of that previously carcinogenic area of our country’s second largest city, that biggest “mountain” of trash and pigs now gone from Porto Romano and just like that this black platform of pollution and rust that has nothing to do with the 21st century, has nothing to do with Europe and its standards, has nothing to do with tourism and the vision of Albania 2030, is also a mountain of garbage and as such it will disappear off the face of the earth forever.
Durres has now earned an amazing ecological park after removing and having the previous mountain of trash gone.
But what is Durres going to gain from removing this disastrous polluting platform?
It is precisely here where reasoning starts and takes over and it is the reasoning that has brought us to this day, with me personally, not only in my capacity as the Prime Minister, but also as a lawmaker representing Durres, I am impatiently and joyfully looking forward, and I am counting the remaining hours until the agreement on the biggest investment in the history of our country is approved. This investment will turn the old port of Durrës from a disastrous platform – a pitch black platform like the face of all those who haunt Albania since 1912 – into one of the largest tourist ports in the Mediterranean, if not the largest should we take into account the accommodation capacities for large yachts and not just the number of berths.
“They are taking our port away, the ancient port, the largest port in the country, to donate huge land area to an anonymous nameless company with partners registered in tax havens, which will throw away not 2 billion euros, but only 80 million, and once was first registered with the National Business Registration Centre after declaring a capital of 100,000 lek only, it is the Rama brothers’ company with the Karriç brothers, who, together with Lulzim Basha, are laundering the money of Lukashenko and Aleksandar Vucic through Mohamed Alabbar.
It took more than three years of many trips, requests and pleas to the Crown Prince to invest in Albania too and not only in the region or everywhere else throughout the world. It took countless, persuasive informative talks about Albania and tough negotiations to convince Mohamed Alabbar to get to work in our country that is still hindered by the veil of old prejudices. These talks were ensued by the meetings of the joint intergovernmental committee with the United Arab Emirates, the versatile work carried out by a whole battalion of people to define the cooperation format and the design of a spectacular port in the Mediterranean. Prolonged negotiations, with, as the minutes of the talks show, only five out of the 33 initial requests of the investor being finally accepted, who repeatedly confronted us with similar contracts he has signed with other countries and we persistently insisted on what we wanted and until the agreement was signed on the largest foreign investment in the history of our region, which according to the stages of development – for you who comment on the people behind this investment to know – this investment’s impact on the country’s GDP is estimated 1.2% to 1.8%.
In the meantime, during a ten-year operation period the investment will be a major contribution to Albania’s economy with a contribution of around eight billion euros to the country’s GDP. The investment will also cause Durres and whole Albania’s value to skyrocket, as the value of all hotels along Durres coast will increase significantly and it will also ultimately that very veil of prejudices you are moving earth and heaven to keep it sticking behind Albania’s face.
For the first time, under a public contract of this country, the immunity of public property from any hypothetical and potential threat from domestic and foreign court rulings is guaranteed. The contract also stipulates that should the investor fails to implement and deliver on his projections, the state can even confiscate everything he has developed up to that moment with zero reimbursement from the state, and there no state property is offered up as a collateral for funding the project, which according to the investor, is the first time happening to him.
Even if all types and species of donkeys of this political and media establishment come together raise their outcry, they stand no chance of denying again Durres and whole Albania this historic chance of hosting such a transformative investment project in all aspects, because one should not also forget that this project has not only received approval by the Durres community through their vote in the elections that brought us to this very hall as a parliamentary majority and you as “the scoundrels union.”
I have promised Durres residents and all Albanian citizens that we will open four gates from the sky and four gates from the sea to turn Albania a regional champion for tourism by 2030, transforming Albania from a country whose tourism industry subsisted on the patriotic tourism of our sister Kosovo until recently into a Balkan champion for tourism and we are well on the right path to delivering on this pledge. Durres is of course the main natural sea gate to take Albania to new heights, whereas the heart of Durres is the right place where this gate should be opened, because it is no longer possible to let chrome ores being dumped and loaded in nature, the cargo ships can no longer be allowed to load and unload goods right in the eyes of tourists, with cranes moving around like the giraffes in a post-apocalyptic movie directed by the Albania film studio “Shqipëria e Re”.
That’s why right where it is needed and right there a brand new heart will be transplanted for tourist Durres, where just half of the 800,000 square meters of the land made available to the developer will be used, whereas the other half, the one you already saw, will be a radically and totally transformed public space, including 700 meters of the beach that currently doesn’t exist at all. Around 17 % of the territory where the new tourist port will be built is currently polluted, unused and it is practically unusable, just like it is the case with the adjacent water area, where a new beach area will be constructed.
It fully matches with Albania’s 21st ambition as a strategically positioned country, not only for tourism, but also to become the major sea gateway to the economy of the entire Western Balkan region. Do you think Albania would become the main commercial gateway to the Western Balkans with the current dirt and mess over there? This is not something I am saying today, but something I have repeatedly stated for years now. The only difference now is that all the fellow compatriots without a homeland, who have been wandering and meandering for a century like Faik’s donkeys for milk or buttermilk, are now fervently launching a frontal attack, because they now understand we have made up our mind and we are dead serious to deliver on the two commercial cargo and tourist port projects, like it or not, and we don’t care at all if you don’t.
These so-called patriots claim that we are giving away a land area that, according to their calculations, costs over 600 or 700 million euros – because their figures are tremendously strange – in exchange for an investment worth around 80 million euros or 120 million euros, because this is allegedly what “is written on the documents.” The truth is that we are not giving away a single square meter, but instead we are granting the right to develop a state property, where, precisely because the state is the owner, the state, for the very first time, will be also a shareholder and a partner with a foreign investment, who, on his part, will not invest neither 80 million nor 120, but a whopping amount of 2.1 billion euros at least! But the so-called patriots, who come from the past, tasked with their mission of old mischief, the calculate the entire property value for the state as partner, whereas calculating only the investor’s share, the liquidity he declares as a planned funding earmarked for the project’s initial stage only, and try to convince the public that the government has exempted the investor from all taxes too.
Nothing has been pardoned, or given away, as the Albanian state will benefit a total of 1.069 billion euros from the Value Added Tax and other contributions.
The infrastructure impact tax is not pardoned, but it is the state’s contribution in its capacity as a partner that will own 33 % of the shares and this amount of shares will never change, while this partner-state included in this investment by us, “the traitors”, to be present there on behalf of all Albanian taxpayers, has the VETO power to approve the budget available for this project, as well as the debt and any important decision to be made. Has this ever happened previously? When? Has it ever happened that the Albanian state joins an investment project in the capacity of a decent partner, owning its shares? No, it has happened that Albania has been offered up in exchange for an amount of one euro. “You are partnering” – they claim – “with an offshore company.”
But the Eagle Hills Company is registered in Abu Dhabi, with known end-beneficiary as already revealed to the public at the parliamentary committees. The confidential guarantors also have been leaked to the digital media channels and they are based in Abu Dhabi.
“But Emaar is not the developer,” – they claim – “and as such it is a fraud.” They keep accusing me, they keep accusing us, because they think we are like they do, greedy land and water grabbers, but they are not refraining from accusing also a personality of the global economy, namely the CEO of the Emaar Group, who is in his own right and freedom to come to Albania through a brand new company and call it “Eagle Hills Albania,” just like he invested in Serbia through ‘’Eagle Hills Serbia’’, just like he has done in many other countries through the Eagle Hills plus the name of the country, but it suffices that Mohamed Alabbar, a leading international entrepreneur and developer, is on the forefront and on the back of this massive investment.
What a malicious mind one should have to level such allegations and accusations against a personality of the global economy, who should be instead welcomed with bouquets of flowers here and without any political distinctions, because he will provide a historical contribution to the country’s economy and will clear the widest way towards employment in the history of this country through a single investment, with at least 12,000 high paying jobs.
