In an Albanian Graft Case, Fake Buyers, ‘Friendly’ Rates, Cash in Crates

In March 2017, an employee of an IT company bought an apartment of 70 square metres on Tirana’s central Kavaja Street, using interest-free loans from two Albanian IT companies. He paid 80,000 euros.

In 2018, even as real estate prices were rising, the person sold the apartment for 48,000 euros - a loss of 32,000 - to a woman whose brother, Daniel Shima, was deputy director of the National Agency for Information Society, AKSHI, a government body under the prime minister tasked with handling the state’s digital public services.

In 2019, the woman sold the property again, this time to a pensioner called Gjinovefa Karcanaj, who paid some 52,000 euros.

According to Albanian anti-corruption prosecutors, the apartment was actually worth 160,000 euros. And the pensioner’s daughter was Mirlinda Karcanaj, the director of AKSHI.

The original buyer, the IT employee, told prosecutors he could not recall “absolutely anything” about the deal or the loans involved.

No wonder, say the prosecutors, given he was just a pawn in an alleged scheme in which the two Albanian IT companies didn’t actually lend him any money at all, but simply bought the apartment under his name and filtered it down to Karcanaj via Shima. The apartment, essentially, was a bribe.