The institute founded by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and another British consulting company provided services to the Albanian government and the Municipality of Tirana, but payments and service contracts are kept secret and non-transparent.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Prime Minister Edi Rama during the conference held in February 2024 in Dubai. Photo courtesy: Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
At a technology conference in February last year in Dubai, Prime Minister Edi Rama took to the podium with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and dedicated his career as a politician and prime minister to the latter.
“I would not be prime minister or a person involved in politics without him,” Rama told the audience, while Blair was in the role of presenter. “And before I knew him [Blair], he was my role model and inspiration to enter politics…,” he added.
But the ties between former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama are not just political.
Since January 2024, the organization he founded, the Tony Blair Institute, has opened a business branch in Albania and provides consultancy to the Albanian government through contracts that are kept secret.
The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is an organization founded by former Prime Minister Blair in 2016 and currently works with leaders from 45 countries around the world.
The Albanian branch of the Tony Blair Institute is headed by David Stephenson, has eight registered employees and for the first year of activity has declared to the National Business Center income worth 9.1 million lek [about 94 thousand euros].
On the third floor of "Torre Drin", declared as the Institute's official address, there are no employees, while the offices are used by an accounting company that also has the "Tony Blair Institute - Albanian branch" as a client.
From public data, it is unclear what specific services this company provides to the Albanian government and how much these services will cost taxpayers.
From the Tony Blair Institute's public posts, it appears that its work is more closely linked to the National Information Society Agency, AKSHI, but this agency denied having a contract on the terms of cooperation.
"The contract is with the Council of Ministers and AKSHI, as a subordinate agency, benefits from the expertise of the Institute in question," AKSHI stated in a written response to BIRN.
The Council of Ministers did not make the contract available by the time of publication of this article, and the press office did not respond to a request to clarify the consultancy's relationship with the Tony Blair Institute.
Rama himself boasted in July about the assistance that this Institute was offering in creating a new organizational structure in the Municipality of Tirana - a model according to him that would be adopted by other municipalities, but the Minister of State for Local Government, Arbjan Mazniku, clarified to BIRN that the consultancy in the Municipality of Tirana was being offered by another British company called 'Delivery Associates'.
Delivery Associates is a consultancy firm founded in 2013 by Sir Michael Barber – an associate of Tony Blair and part of his administration from 2001-2005.
The agreement with "Delivery Associates" was trumpeted in the summer of 2024 by Tirana Mayor Erion Veliaj as an audit of the municipality's work, but the contract and the cost of this service were never made public.
Mazniku told BIRN that the report that Delivery Associates has done for the Tirana municipality is 'quality' and the guidelines will be used by other municipalities 'at no cost' to them or the government.
The Media and Information Agency did not respond to BIRN's questions about whether it was a mistake on the part of the prime minister to bill the work done by Delivery Associates for the Tony Blair Institute or whether there was a connection between their work for the government and the Tirana municipality.
The Municipality of Tirana refused to make available the contract with “Delivery Associates” claiming that “the Archives sector… found a lack of data necessary to identify the documentation.” Absurdly, the Municipality asked BIRN to make available the document’s registration number and date in order to identify it.
Also, the Tony Blair Institute, Delivery Associates and the latter's director for Europe, Anna Sakiqi, did not respond to BIRN's requests for comment by the time of publication of this article.
Even former Prime Minister Tony Blair's previous work in Albania has been shrouded in a lack of transparency.
Blair has advised the government of Prime Minister Edi Rama through “Tony Blair Associates” - a partnership that began in 2013 and was declared closed in 2016, but his work in Albania remained a mystery and was never really revealed. Meanwhile, his wife, Cherrie Blair’s law firm, also won contracts from the Albanian government while her husband was an advisor.
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