At the capital’s landfill, along the Erzen Valley in Sharra, the mountain of urban waste continues to rise stubbornly toward the sky, while dump trucks deliver new tonnes of rubbish every day, which is piled up by bulldozers and compacted onto the existing mass.
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Located next to Sharra Cemetery in Tirana, the landfill bakes under the scorching August sun and releases a pungent stench of gases into the air that mercilessly assaults the nostrils. At the site where the Tirana incinerator was supposed to be built—depicted in the concessionaire’s computer-generated videos as a futuristic complex shaped like twin pyramids of tinted glass and metal framework—there is no trace of the promised investment.
After six years of investigations and public debate, the Special Prosecution Office Against Corruption and Organized Crime, SPAK, sent 12 people for trial in mid-July. They are accused of being part of a structured “white-collar” criminal group that, according to prosecutors, was led by fugitive businessmen Mirel Mërtiri and Klodian Zoto and is suspected of diverting tens of millions of euros in public funds earmarked for the Tirana waste-treatment concession.
According to the investigation file submitted to the Special Court Against Corruption and Organized Crime, GJKKO, a copy of which was obtained by BIRN, the defendants are accused of illegally obtaining substantial sums of money through fraud while failing to carry out the planned investments.
“Mirel Mërtiri and Klodian Zoto used a mechanism to withdraw funds from the concession company’s accounts through fraudulent fictitious invoices, the use of shell companies created inside and outside the country, and cash transfers,” SPAK prosecutors said in a media statement.
The Tirana incinerator case is one of SPAK’s most significant investigations, not only because of the high value of the concession contract but also because of the negative impact that the failure to make the investments has had on urban waste management—one of the country’s most pressing environmental challenges.
“For years, we have accumulated tonnes of waste and lost valuable time and funds which, had they been put toward genuine waste management, would have resulted in a much-improved situation on the ground today,” said Besjana Guri, head of the Lumi environmental center and a winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize as part of the successful campaign to protect the wild Vjosa riverbed and turn the valley into a national park.
“Not only has the situation not improved, but waste from across the country continues to be deposited in landfills and illegal dumping sites or thrown along riverbanks, making the pollution continuous and uncontrolled,” she added.
Businessmen Klodian Zoto and Mirel Mërtiri have been fugitives since 2024. They are believed to have taken refuge in Austria and could not be reached for comment. Meanwhile, Mërtiri’s lawyer, Klodian Skënderaj, told BIRN that SPAK “invented the term beneficial owner for Mr. Mërtiri and, without attributing any specific act to him, has brought a series of charges that are not based on concrete facts.”
Within a few years of the Socialist Party coming to power, companies linked to Klodian Zoto, Mirel Mërtiri and his partner, Stela Gugallja, secured three projects from the Albanian government to build and operate incinerators in Elbasan, Fier and Tirana. The first two projects had a combined value of around 50 million euros, while the 30-year Tirana contract envisaged revenues of nearly 430 million euros over the full concession period.
The concession contract for the Tirana incinerator was signed in 2017. It included the construction of a landfill, the installation of a waste-to-energy plant to generate electricity, and the rehabilitation of the existing disposal site in Tirana’s waste-treatment area. In exchange for an investment valued by the Ministry of Environment at 128 million euros, municipalities in Tirana County would deposit their waste for a fee of 29 euros per tonne over a 30-year period.
The contract followed an unsolicited proposal from the companies Energy Recuperator S.P.A, Paul Wurth Italia S.P.A and Integrated Technology Services sh.p.k. (ITS), the latter owned by businessman Klodian Zoto.
However, SPAK’s investigation found that the initiative to build the Tirana incinerator had been planned as early as 2015 by the Ministry of Environment and the Municipality of Tirana. Not only was the proposal not Klodian Zoto’s idea, but the documents submitted to obtain the concession were also drafted by public officials who were being paid simultaneously by the state and by his company, ITS.
The investigation file describes ongoing communication between Vladimir Bezhani, a former adviser to the Ministry of Environment, and the wanted businessman. According to evidence obtained by SPAK, Bezhani sent Zoto documents and information and even personally drafted the “Letter of Interest” presented as the company’s unsolicited proposal in the concession procedure.
Bezhani himself admitted that while serving as an external adviser to former Environment Minister Lefter Koka, he was being paid by Zoto’s company and used the Ministry of Environment’s official email address to communicate with the company. SPAK argues that these circumstances demonstrate the high level of coordination between officials within the contracting authority and the proposing company, calling into question the project’s “unsolicited” nature.
Data obtained by SPAK from emails seized from Klodian Zoto’s computer also suggest that the concession company inflated the cost of the landfill investment by 25.7 million euros, while half of the waste-disposal fee represented profit for the concessionaire.
According to the investigation file, on August 26, 2016, Klodian Zoto emailed Paul Wurth with projections for the business plan, in which the total investment cost was estimated at around 102.5 million euros.
“Dear gentlemen, attached is the real business plan, not the state one,” Zoto wrote to his Italian partners.
Bezhani is not the only public official to have benefited financially from preferential treatment granted to the concession companies and businessmen Zoto and Mërtiri.
The two businessmen are suspected of transferring millions of euros in bribes to relatives and associates of senior officials—including former Environment Minister Lefter Koka, former ministry secretary-general Alqi Bllako and former deputy prime minister Arben Ahmetaj—to secure the contracts for the construction of the incinerators.
Koka has been found guilty of corruption, money laundering and abuse of office, while Bllako was convicted of abuse of office. The case against Ahmetaj is expected to be heard by the Special Court, while the former deputy prime minister has left the country and is seeking political asylum in Switzerland.
All three former officials have denied the charges, describing them as politically motivated.
According to Jorida Tabaku, a Democratic Party member of the Albanian Parliament and chair of the 2021 Parliamentary Investigative Committee on the Incinerators, SPAK has uncovered a significant part of the incinerator scheme but has yet to provide a complete picture of criminal responsibility, the links among the three contracts and the ultimate destination of the money.
She links this partial result to the division of the investigation into several separate proceedings. Although she acknowledges that prosecutors may have had their own procedural reasons for this approach, Tabaku believes the investigation has so far produced a fragmented picture of the case. According to the opposition MP, it remains unclear why SPAK classified the Tirana incinerator scheme as the activity of a structured criminal group, while the same actors were not considered part of such a group in the Fier and Elbasan incinerator cases.
“We still do not understand how three private actors managed to reach the level of Albania’s deputy prime minister and how several ministers, at different times, became involved in the same scheme,” she said, adding that testimony collected by the Investigative Committee and media investigations point to “direct channels of communication and intervention reaching the highest levels of government.”
“These links have yet to receive a full criminal and institutional response,” Tabaku emphasized.
According to SPAK, the concession company behind the Tirana incinerator had a two-tier ownership structure running through the Netherlands that, regardless of the names appearing in official documents, was in fact controlled by Klodian Zoto and Mirel Mërtiri.
The consortium of companies that won the Tirana incinerator concession initially established a holding company in Eindhoven called Integrated Energy B.V. Through it, Integrated Energy BV SPV sh.p.k. was subsequently established in Albania and signed the concession contract with the Ministry of Environment on August 31, 2017. The Dutch company owned 100% of the Albanian concessionaire’s shares.
According to SPAK, Integrated Energy B.V. was established by Klodian Zoto’s Integrated Technology Services, ITS, and the two Italian partners, Paul Wurth Italia and Energy Recuperator. However, a cooperation agreement concluded before the company was established stipulated that, after the concession was secured, the Italian partners would transfer their shares to ITS if the latter requested them.
The formal ownership structure changed several times in the following years. On June 25, 2021, three Italian citizens were declared in Albania’s beneficial ownership register as shareholders in the Dutch company—by then renamed Geogenix BV: Giuseppe Ciaffaglione with 30%, Salvatore Russelli with 25% and Alberto Pressezzi with 43%.
Pressezzi explained to prosecutors that his and his partners’ involvement in Geogenix was as “dormant shareholders” and was conditional on securing 100 million euros in financing for the construction of the Tirana incinerator. Only if the financing was secured would they become active shareholders and assume full financial and managerial control of the company. According to his testimony, the financing was not secured and that control was never exercised.
Following this series of formal ownership changes, SPAK alleges that the reins of control remained in the hands of Zoto and Mërtiri. According to prosecutors, the two were the de facto owners of the Dutch company and used other people and companies to conceal the true ownership while continuing to make decisions and issue instructions to its managers. Mërtiri, in particular, appears as a micromanager who decided security guards’ salaries and punished subordinates with financial penalties for “failing to inform a superior.”
According to Zef Preçi, an economist and director of the Albanian Center for Economic Research, ACER, the use of offshore companies and opaque ownership structures by a concessionaire financed with public money poses a high institutional and fiscal risk because it undermines one of the basic principles of accountability—knowing who benefits and where public funds end up.
“When the true owners are hidden behind such structures, it becomes more difficult for the authorities to verify the concessionaire’s links to public officials, politically exposed persons or sanctioned entities, while simultaneously weakening oversight of conflicts of interest and the use of public money,” Preçi said.
“Offshore structures make it significantly more difficult to identify beneficial owners and follow the money trail, particularly when chains of companies, nominee shareholders and jurisdictions that do not provide timely or complete ownership information are used,” he added.
According to Preçi, if a concessionaire financed with public funds is allowed to use offshore structures and opaque ownership without being subject to full identification, verification and monitoring, the problem goes beyond the responsibility of the individuals involved and exposes systemic weaknesses in the mechanisms for overseeing public money.
“Our system, mainly because of political control, the government’s open cooperation with oligarchs and links extending into segments of organized crime, continues to display pronounced weaknesses,” he said.
“International reports on Albania, as well as our own studies, continue to highlight risks related to potential PPP liabilities, a lack of fiscal transparency and weaknesses in contract monitoring,” Preçi added.
When the state took control of the company that had won the Tirana incinerator concession in the summer of 2023, there was a vast gap between the money that had passed through the company and what had actually been built. Integrated Energy BV SPV had received more than 11.3 billion lek (around 104 million euros) from public funds and other sources linked to its activities, and had taken out around 12.9 million euros in bank loans, of which 8.8 million euros remained unpaid. But according to the technical expert report, the investments actually made amounted to only 21 million euros, or 12.4% of the projected value, while just 4 million lek (around 37,000 euros) remained in the company’s accounts.
For SPAK investigators, this gap raised a fundamental question: where had the money gone?
An accounting expert report provided part of the answer. According to the report, most of the money handled by the concessionaire had not been invested in constructing the incinerator in accordance with the project and business plan, but had instead been used for the company’s own operations and for payments to its main subcontractor, Integrated Technology Services, ITS, owned by Klodian Zoto. Around 5.6 billion lek (51.5 million euros), or 45.1% of total purchases, was recorded as self-billing—a bookkeeping mechanism in which the fiscal document for a transaction is generated by the entity itself—while 2.72 billion lek (25 million euros), or 21.9%, was linked to ITS. Operating expenses, including wages and social security contributions, added another 1.83 billion lek (16.8 million euros).
Tracing the bank accounts took the investigation further. According to SPAK, ITS received more than 3 billion lek (27.6 million euros) from the concessionaire, as well as another 6.7 million euros in payments that significantly exceeded the value of the subcontracting agreement between the two companies—which prosecutors consider to have been falsified—and the approximately 2.88 billion lek (26.5 million euros) in declared invoices.
Within this flow of funds, prosecutors also identified around 973 million lek (9 million euros) in falsified invoices linked to companies that, according to the investigation, were fictitious and conducted no genuine commercial activity. Banking records show that ITS paid around 398.3 million lek (3.7 million euros) and 2.27 million euros for these invoices, money that SPAK says was subsequently withdrawn in cash and ultimately went to Mirel Mërtiri and Klodian Zoto.
SPAK also alleges that Mërtiri and Zoto instructed the concessionaire’s staff to withdraw around 112.8 million lek (1 million euros) and 247,000 euros directly from the company’s bank accounts, funds suspected of having been used for their personal interests.
The trail of diverted money also crossed Albania’s borders. EM Capital Group AD, a Bulgarian company controlled by Mërtiri in which Zoto later also became a shareholder, received 1.05 million euros from the concessionaire for engineering services. But according to SPAK, the investigation found no evidence that the company had supplied the goods, designs or services for which it was paid.
According to prosecutors, a similar mechanism was used with the Dutch parent company, Geogenix BV. Integrated Energy BV SPV transferred hundreds of thousands of euros to it through accounts in Turkey and Lithuania, based on invoices that SPAK considers fictitious and that were linked to a 3.2-million-euro contract for the supply of a flue-gas treatment plant.
But transfers to affiliated companies and invoices suspected of being fictitious were only some of the methods that SPAK alleges were used to extract money from the concession.
The investigation also describes inflated engineering service costs, the diversion of revenue from the dumping of soil and construction debris, cash movements through currency-exchange offices, clearing arrangements and real-estate payments—mechanisms that, according to prosecutors, served to channel some of the funds linked to the concession toward private interests.
According to MP Jorida Tabaku, the flow of money documented by SPAK may be only the tip of the iceberg, as there is still no clear picture of all the transactions.
“We do not know where all the money ended up, how many companies and accounts it passed through, what assets it created or who the true ultimate beneficiaries are,” she said.
“There are serious grounds to suspect that the circle of beneficiaries does not end with the individuals identified so far and that the links may extend to higher levels,” Tabaku added.
Although the Tirana incinerator was never built and the concession company has been under preventive seizure since July 2023, municipalities in Tirana and Durrës counties pay tens of millions of euros every year to deposit waste in the landfill, even though no incineration takes place.
These payments, together with the millions of euros that SPAK alleges were diverted through the scheme established by Mirel Mërtiri and Klodian Zoto, highlight the weaknesses of the state and justice institutions in protecting public money and recovering funds suspected of being proceeds of corruption or criminal activity.
“The incinerator case highlights the lack of tools and the legal gaps faced by the justice authorities in freezing or recovering these funds,” said Rigels Xhemollari, executive director of Civic Resistance, adding that even when abuse is identified, “corrupt interests manage to prevail over the public interest.”
According to Xhemollari, the state is thus able to diagnose corruption, but not stop it or recover the damage caused. The inability to halt abusive mechanisms in time creates conditions for them to be repeated in other public projects, he said, while criminal investigations in some cases last longer than the implementation of the projects under investigation.
MP Jorida Tabaku has also raised questions about the scope of the investigation, emphasizing that the Rama government’s new scandals should not eclipse this case.
According to Tabaku, there has been no public answer regarding the role of the Municipality of Tirana or the chain of decision-making within the central government that led to the declaration of the environmental emergency that paved the way for the incinerator projects. She also singles out the dumping of soil from construction sites at the Sharra landfill as an issue that has not been fully clarified and which, according to her, created a “de facto monopoly” and an additional source of revenue for the concessionaire.
The opposition MP is also demanding answers regarding the execution of international arrest warrants, the tracing of assets and the recovery of the money. According to her, a financial investigation does not end with the filing of charges, but must identify the ultimate beneficiaries and lead to the seizure of the proceeds of criminal offenses.
“SPAK has uncovered a significant part of the case, but answers are still lacking on the most fundamental issues: the full chain of decision-making, the connection among the three case files, the flow of money, the ultimate beneficiaries and the recovery of the proceeds of criminal offenses,” Tabaku said, describing the incinerator investigation as “the litmus test for justice reform.”/Reporter.al
