ActionAid Italia, a non-governmental organization in Italy, has addressed the Court of Auditors (Corte dei Conti) with a 60-page complaint and the National Anti-Corruption Authority, ANAC, with a special report, requesting an investigation into "unjustified misuse of public resources" in the project of detention centers for migrants in Albania, part of the Italy-Albania protocol.
Based on the data collected by the “Trattenuti” project that the organization carries out in collaboration with the University of Bari, ActionAid asks the Lazio Regional Prosecutor’s Office to consider launching an investigation for damage to public finances. At the same time, the National Anti-Corruption Authority (ANAC) has been notified of suspected irregularities in the award of the 133 million euro management contract for the centers.
In the complaint, the organization argues that “public money was diverted from health, justice, welfare and services, as well as emergency management funds” to maintain a scheme that it calls “inhumane, ineffective and incompatible with the law.” The organization says the loss to public finances “cannot be justified as a simple technical error.”
The organization’s findings were previously documented by a BIRN investigation, which noted that funds for the construction of the centers in Shëngjin and Gjadra increased from 39.2 million euros to over 74 million, while the average cost for a bed in Albania reached around 72 thousand euros, almost 11 times more than in the model center in Modica in Italy. The investigation also found that the entire procedure was carried out through direct negotiation and without competition.
The centers, which have been widely criticized by human rights organizations, have not fulfilled the function for which they were established. Originally conceived as an “offshore” structure for examining asylum applications, they now function as repatriation centers, CPRs, for people who have been on Italian territory and against whom an extradition decision has been taken. They remain partially unused, while there are reports of self-harm and suicide attempts among detainees who were transferred there.
In addition to the disputed management contract worth 133 million euros and construction costs, ActionAid Italia has also denounced the operational costs of the centers, which they say are dozens of times higher than in Italy. The organization says that 2.6 million euros were spent on the transportation alone on the Libra ship, including investments in the maintenance and supply of the ship that was later donated to Albania.
According to data collected by the organization through Freedom of Information requests, the Ministry of Interior has spent 630,000 euros on transfers and the purchase of control technologies. Meanwhile, a very high budget item concerns food and accommodation for law enforcement officers.
“While in 2024 the CPR of Macomer (Province of Nuoro, Sardinia) cost 5,884.80 euros per day, in Albania, for only 120 hours of real operations between October and December, almost 18 times more was spent, reaching 105,616 euros per day,” the organization points out. According to it, these costs are in some cases even 28 times more than the daily amount spent on CPR in Italy. /BIRN/
