There is a phenomenon that has already become consolidated in Edi Rama's government. Every time a scandal breaks out and the government is caught red-handed and elsewhere stealing citizens' money, a joint-stock company with state or even mixed capital is created.
The story began with the incinerator affair. After SPAK exposed and arrested some of those who had been swindling money behind the backs of the innocent prime minister, the government created the National Waste Management Agency in the form of a joint-stock company.
After the sterilization concession affair broke out, the National Sterilization Operator JSC was born. After SPAK began tracking the theft of military property, KAYO JSC emerged, and after the explosion of the digital swamp in AKSHI, which spread to Germany, the ICT Operating Company was invented.
The sprouting of joint stock companies like mushrooms after rain, or more precisely like mushrooms after thefts, is not a random panic move. It is part of a well-thought-out plan, which has two goals. First, to remove political responsibility from Edi Rama and his inner circle for future affairs that will come.
Even though Edi Rama is not responsible for anyone, according to the famous motto that responsibility is individual, again, in terms of political cost it is not the same when Belinda Balluku and Mirlinda Karçanaj are caught stealing as when an anonymous director of a joint-stock company is caught. The point is, today the directors of the Waste Agency and the Sterilization Operator are not even known by 1 percent of the population.
But while the first goal is to remove political responsibility from the court, the second goal is even more diabolical. It is to relax the mechanisms of transparency, public control, and ultimately remove criminal responsibility from the dome of the Rilindja organization.
Take just one element. Transactions of joint-stock companies are not recorded in the treasury. Citizens, and even journalists, will find it impossible to track where the billions of Sterilization, KAYO, the Waste Agency and the ICT Operating Company are going. This is a terrible handicap in terms of transparency, accountability and control over state finances.
Beyond this, the invention of fake joint stock companies with state-private partnerships weakens the institutional mechanisms of financial control from the Albanian Supreme Audit Office to the public financial inspection. Today, KAYO is procuring billions in secret through private brokers.
This whole scheme is nothing more than the creation of large extra-budgetary pockets. According to the government's own plans, KAYO is thought to be a 200-300 million euro business per year. The digital front, too, is more or less on this scale. The Waste Agency will be at least as big as the three incinerators combined, and so on.
In short, with just 4 joint-stock companies, the government is taking almost 1 billion euros a year out of the budget. And this is the worst possible practice of managing public money. Not only because it creates huge avenues for abuse and theft, but also because it avoids the criminal liability of the dome.
Tomorrow, after these joint-stock companies have consumed their billion-dollar affairs and SPAKU's turn will come, but always only after the money has been stolen, some dummy supervisory councils and some public or private administrator will be declared responsible. Meanwhile, the dome will continue the business of plunder, now calm and without any control from SPAK.
This must be prevented by all means. The privatization of public procurement is an illegal madness, since the management of common money is an inalienable public function as an administrative decision-making, which must necessarily come from a state body.
The moment this function is transferred to private or mixed hands with more relaxed rules and without effective control, only two things will happen. First, the government will get out of the current impasse, where theft has become a little more difficult because people no longer agree to sign for fear of SPAK. While the second consequence is that citizens' money will be brutally massacred.
Editorial
