On the ruins of the Kombinat, where residents continue to suffer the wounds of dust, waiting and prolonged promises of Reconstruction, millions of euros from citizens' taxes are flowing into the wrong hands, with the signature of the Municipality of Tirana itself. Earlier this week, the largest local institution in the country announced the winners of two tenders worth a total of 760 million lek, or about 8.2 million euros, for the construction of two new buildings in this area. But behind the official documents lies a serious scandal that directly affects the security, ethics and legality of public tenders.
The winner for both facilities was announced as the company "Erald-G" sh.pk, in joint venture with "NIKA" sh.pk. The owner of "Erald-G", Gëzim Ismaili, is not an unknown name for justice. The Special Prosecution Office accuses Ismaili of having carried out numerous financial actions to hide and launder the dirty money of Luciano Koçek, considered the head of the dangerous drug trafficking clan known as the "Aruba Group".
In June of this year, prosecutors officially requested house arrest for Ismail, arguing that he posed a direct risk of continuing the criminal activity of money laundering. However, the Municipality of Tirana has completely ignored these details about his personality, rewarding the company in question with millions of euros of public money and not with one, but with two tenders.
In addition to the shadow of organized crime, the procedure itself raises strong suspicions of pure favoritism and fixed competition. In both procedures, the winning companies did not have the most economical bid, but despite this they were declared winners by the contracting authority.
11 companies had expressed interest in the construction of building number 10, with a limited fund of 288 million lek or about 3 million euros.
In the competition was the significantly more economical offer of the merger of the operators “Ed Konstruksion”, “OBKonstruksion” and “Zenit&Co” with the value of 210.5 million lek. This offer was about 23 million lek, or about 200 thousand euros, less than that of the winner, but the Municipality of Tirana passed it over in silence and chose the offer of 233.8 million lek of the merger of “NIKA” & “ERALD-G”, without giving any public justification for rejecting the cheapest offer.
The same scheme was repeated in the second tender for the construction of building number 11, with a limit fund of 471 million lek or about 5 million euros. Out of 9 economic operators in the competition, 5 were disqualified and the winner was again the same consortium of operators with a bid of 372.3 million lek.
Among the disqualified were companies that requested significantly less public money for the same work, such as the company "CURRI" sh.pk with a bid of 271.3 million lek, about 1 million euros less than the winner, and "PEPA GROUP" with a bid of 362.9 million lek.
In both cases, the mathematics of the public competition was overturned and those who asked for the most money won.
The root of this scandal dates back to the sensational raid of June 10, 2026, when SPAK announced that they had issued about 20 arrest warrants for the criminal group that transported strong narcotics from Latin America to Europe. Names like Luçiano Koçeku and Artur Shehu are suspected of having poured hundreds of millions of euros of this traffic into the construction industry in Albania. The group took the name “Aruba” from the meetings that the leaders held on the Caribbean island, where, according to the file received from the Belgian authorities, senior Albanian government officials also participated.
Today, while SPAK has not provided any details and has not issued any security measures for the senior officials involved in those files, the suspected dirty money is finding its way into public tenders with the signatures of local officials. For the residents of the Kombinat, the reconstruction remains a dream suspended in the dust, while for the suspected criminal clans and the officials who support them, it has turned into a multi-million dollar business that does not stop in the face of any law.
