How to Launder Art and Money through Waste Management Concessions

VINCENT WJ VAN GERVEN OEI/ The Albanian Mechanism

 On July 1, 2021, contemporary art platform Harabel presented a sculpture of Kosovar artist Sislej Xhafa, entitled Bleta (“The Bee”), on the Sharra landfill, the municipal waste deposit site of the municipality of Tirana. Xhafa’s schulpture was supposed to be the first of a series of public artworks that would transform this “private property” into a “contemporary art sculpture park.” Historically, the Sharra landfill is the site where on August 7, 2016 an excavator crushed 17-year-old Ardit Gjoklaj, who had been illegally employed by a waste management plant on the landfill operated by 3R, a company from Peqin owned by a Socialist Party functionary.

Mayor of Tirana Erion Veliaj had publicly promoted the waste management plant as an exemplary employment opportunity for the local community, claiming it abided by all legal standards. But when the tragic circumstances around Gjoklaj’s death were uncovered, media reporting of the scandal was aggressively suppressed. The prosecution of 3R and its owner was shut down. When confronted with this history, Harabel commented on social media that “Sislej chose to install his oeuvre at the Waste Treatment Area of Tirana, a very delicate location which he visited and solely chose, without any prior suggestion by Harabel.”

Harabel is a non-profit foundation that “focuses on the promotion of contemporary art” founded in 2018 by artist Driant Zeneli and “cultural promotor” Ajola Xoxa, a lawyer specialized in energy law who also happens to be Mayor Veliaj’s wife. Soon after its establishment, Harabel launched a number of high-profile public art projects, featuring internationally renowned artists such as Anri Sala (also on Harabel’s board), Adrian Paci, and Xhafa. With the contemporary art scene in Tirana struggling both in terms of funding and space, and considering that neither Zeneli, then a recent remigrant, nor Xoxa were firmly rooted in that scene, Harabel’s meteoric rise was remarkable.

On the current Harabel website, Xoxa lists herself as “co-founder” and “creative director.” She is also founder of NAAN Gallery and GurGur Gallery, where Harabel has been organizing exhibitions. Harabel’s official address at Sky Tower in the heart of the expensive Blloku area of Tirana is in the same building as Xoxa’s law practice, The Partners, and Harabel’s former program executive and current legal coordinator, Xhoi Skënderasi, also used to sit on the board of Xoxa’s publishing company, Botimet Enciklopedike. In other words, Harabel is very much connected to Xoxa’s business interests. But how is this non-profit funded? And how does it get access to prime plots of land for its public art projects?

A recently published document provides one of the missing pieces of the puzzle. The contract stipulates that Xhafa will “donate” his work Bleta to Harabel, and that a company called “Integrated Energy BV SPV” will install and maintain the work on its property for at least five years on behalf of Harabel and the artist. Whereas this document solves the question as to how Harabel structures its public art projects, this particular legal construction raises a number of others, the obvious one being: Why would Integrated Energy BV SPV, a private company established for “the management, administration and realization of works for the construction of the Waste Treatment Zone Tirana,” provide its property and support free of charge for the creation of a sculpture park on the outskirts of Tirana?

In order to be able to answer this question, we need to understand how Integrated Energy BV SPV came into possession of the Sharra landfill. One of the best sources to do so is the dossier on former Deputy Prime Minister Arben Ahmetaj compiled by the Special Structure against Corruption and Organized Crime (SPAK) in July 2023. This dossier, 320 pages long, provides a detailed account of Ahmetaj’s business relations and exploits since 2008, in particular with those people who turn out to be in charge of the Sharra landfill. The amount of criminal activity documented in this dossier is staggering: bribes, corruption, impersonation of officials, falsification of documents, tax fraud… the list is overwhelming. What I provide below is only the tiniest, simplified sliver.

Our part of the story begins on January 28, 2016, when Mayor Veliaj writes to the Ministry of Finance about the “improvement of the management urban waste in the city of Tirana,” claiming to have recently completed a feasibility study about setting up a concession for the waste management in Tirana. The proposal finds its way to the desk of Minister of Environment Lefter Koka, who responds positively to Mayor Veliaj about his plans. Minister Koka’s response is also forwarded to businessman Klodian Zoto: “look at this and tell me if you agree.”

At this point, Zoto and his business partner Mirel Mërtiri already control two other waste management concessions in Fier and Elbasan through a series of interconnected companies all headquartered in Sky Tower. Now, they eye another concession, the largest so far: waste management of Tirana at the Sharra landfill. Having been informed of Mayor Veliaj’s initiative, the unregistered company Integrated Energy BV follows the Elbasan playbook and makes an unsolicited offer to the Ministry of Environment for the construction of a waste management facility near Tirana. On the basis of this offer, the government opens a public tender procedure, while on August 19, 2016, the company registers itself as Integrated Energy BV in the Netherlands with €50,000 in capital and Zoto as one of the directors. The rest of the board is filled with various lawyers specialized in setting up shell companies, one of the main vehicles through which the Dutch government facilitates international tax evasion.1

Integrated Energy BV is actively involved in the drafting procedure for the tender in which they intend to take part, and receives information about its competitors from the Ministry of Environment. In a flawed procedure, the Council of Ministers then grants Integrated Energy BV an 8% bonus in the tender evaluation, all but securing the concession for the company. On August 31, 2017, Integrated Energy BV SPV, registered a day prior and owned 100% by the Dutch shell company Integrated Energy BV, is granted the €130 million, 30-year exclusive concession “for the construction of a landfill, incinerator, and rehabilitation of the extant depositing sites in Tirana and the production of electric energy” by Minister Koka. The convenience of this contract for the concession holder is that he is paid per metric ton of urban waste, even if none of the promised construction work is undertaken. This urban waste inflow is, in fact, guaranteed by the Municipality of Tirana, which commits to paying the difference in case the inflow falls below a pre-established threshold.

In clear breach of the concession contract, the construction of the incinerator is never started, and several Albanian journalists, including yours truly, start investigating Zoto and Mërtiri’s multiple concessions and the intricate relations between their different (shell) companies.2 In 2020, the Special Structure against Corruption and Organized Crime (SPAK) launches an investigation into the waste management concessions at the request of the opposition.

In March 2022, SPAK issues arrest warrants against former minister Koka, Zoto, and others in their investigation of the Fier concession. In response, Geogenix BV (the new name of the Dutch shell company Integrated Energy BV) releases a press statement claiming that they have severed all bonds with the companies managed by Zoto.

On September 25, 2023, the Special Court on Corruption and Organized Crime sentences Koka to 6 years and 8 months in prison in the Fier case. Bllako receives 2 years and 8 months and Zoto 8 years. A month later, on October 5, 2023, Koka receives an additional sentence of 5 years and 8 months in prison in the Elbasan case. Mërtiri and Zoto both get 6 years and 8 months.

Meanwhile, the SPAK investigation into the Tirana concession continues. In August 2023, the Sharra landfill and all the other properties of Integrated Energy BV SPV are confiscated and a new set of arrest warrants is issued in December.

When an investigate journalist makes public, based on the Ahmetaj dossier, that it was Mayor Veliaj who initiated the concession procedure, he attacks her by calling her a “contract killer.” He denies in public to have any close connection to the concession, claiming he simply “has the duty to bring the waste to the gate.”

Mayor Veliaj is summoned by SPAK to testify in the case on April 30, 2024, concerning his role in initiating the concession procedure and the involvement of his direct subordinates in the fraud and falsification of documents in the process of its drafting and approval.3

Let us now return to Ajola Xoxa’s presentation of Sislej Xhafa’s work on the property of Integrated Energy BV SPV: Why would a waste management company be interested in sponsoring the curatorial vanity career of the wife of the mayor?

As may have become clear from the events surrounding Zoto and Mërtiri’s exploits and the multiple SPAK cases that feature them in corrupt entanglements with a host of Socialist Party politicians and bureaucrats on both local and national level, every gesture is transactional. It would thus not be unreasonable to think that also their sponsorship of Harabel’s art event has ulterior motives, a single episode in a complex mutual exchange of favors between Veliaj’s municipality and the businessmen.

So perhaps we may, after having presented a factual account, end with a brief speculation: As evidenced by the Ahmetaj dossier, Integrated Energy BV SPV was granted the Sharra concession thanks to the initiative and support of Mayor Veliaj, whose municipality is also responsible for the payments to Integrated Energy BV SPV for a period of 30 years. In return, the company made the small gesture of supporting the mayor’s wife’s nascent curatorial career by sponsoring a sculpture park on top of the landfill it manages. In all this, the artist, Sislej Xhafa, who had spontaneously chosen the site “without any prior suggestion,” provided a façade of respectibility, while in practice facilitating the artwashing4 of a concession managed on blood-soaked ground at the long-term financial detriment of the citizens of Tirana, who are already faced with a steep increase in waste collection costs.

At the end of the day, the money that circulated via Xoxa’s “non-profit foundation” Harabel and her gallery spaces is negligable within the broader landscape of Albanian expropriations, privatizations, and concessions. But the principle that emerges from it is certainly the signature of the government’s modus operandi, which since its inception has actively appropriated certain forms of cultural expression to serve its propagandistic needs, distracting the public eye its internal workings.

Integrated Energy BV SPV, Harabel, and Sislej Xhafa were invited to respond to the claims in this article. They chose not to.