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Witch hunt with the Llogara tender

2025-11-23 19:21:00, Opinione Fatos Çoçoli

In our country, every major public project has a predetermined fate: as soon as the winner of the tender is announced, the political season of accusations automatically opens. The Llogara Tunnel, a strategic work that was supposed to focus the debate on shortening the time to get to the Albanian Riviera, on the impact on tourism and on infrastructure modernization, immediately turned into a platform for political calculations, conspiracy theories and accusations without evidence.

A typical witch hunt, where the guilty are invented, before the facts are sought. SPAK also contributed to the renewed momentum of this hunt, allowing itself to secretly transmit to some media phrases detached from the dispute, of the interception of communications of a high-ranking official, the deputy prime minister, in order to produce a popular trial of speculations about abuse and even corruption in the selection of the winning company of the tender.

If an independent expert were brought in from abroad and presented with the accusations-assumptions that were made publicly, that the tender was "fixed", "manipulated", "fabricated" or "closed", his/her only professional reaction would be: "Where is the evidence?".

But the political debate in Albania, fueled by the irresponsible behavior of SPAK with the public "debunking" of phrases from its own investigation, has no patience for evidence. In the absence of them, a narrative is built. In the absence of documents, doubts are raised. In the absence of transparency read with a professional eye, a scandal is necessarily sought.

In this terrain, the Llogara Tunnel project became an ideal victim: large, expensive, complex, and all technically unfathomable to most of the politicians who talk about it every day.

One of the biggest problems in understanding the procedures for such a tender by citizens and the public opinion is that international tendering procedures, which include FIDIC professional standards https://fidic.org/books/construction-contract-2nd-ed-2017-red-book. They include strict requirements for specialized experience, financial criteria and safety techniques.

These demands, when not explained in public, are easily interpreted publicly by our politicians as deliberate coercion to exclude certain companies. The fact that none of the participating and unsuccessful companies in the Llogara Tunnel tender complained is irrelevant to the witch-hunters.

None of them openly says that the tunnel is not a village road, but a high-class work, requiring companies with a specific portfolio of expertise in alpine tunnels. This brings a paradox, since in our country it is publicly required that large tenders be both ultra-technical and ultra-open to any interested Albanian company, regardless of whether it meets the strict technical conditions, even for companies that have never drilled a mountain. This is absurd. But this absurdity feeds the witch hunt best.

Thus, the fact that the bridge present in the project was not built is anathema. And even, since the tunnel resulted, fortunately, with two passage pipes (the excavation went very well), from a main movement pipe and an emergency pipe that was in the project, the cost of building the bridge, from 5-6 million euros estimated in the project, is multiplied by the witch hunt cooks to 25 million euros.

And the fantasy of the conspiracy theorists deepens: since we have two pipes, two bridges were needed. And since these two bridges were not built, the damage and theft is 50 million euros! In fact, the project implementers simply chose, in order not to increase the cost and not to bring it by 5-6 million euros more, that the trajectory of the road to the tunnel be diverted and there would be no need to build a bridge in the project, which, indeed, with the two pipes, if the road had not been diverted, would have required the construction of two bridges. /CNA