A year later, Dedja sold C.G.C Company back to Gugallja for 600,000 euros.
Albanian prosecutors have found no data on the first sale from Gugallja to Dedja – but they have found documents concerning the transfer in four tranches of the 600,000 euros to Dedja’s Swiss bank account.
They believe the first transaction was fake – and that the second was organised for the purpose of transferring huge sums of money to Switzerland.
At the time of the transaction, Gugallja was sole owner and administrator of Albtek, a company then building a now notorious waste incineration plant in the city of Elbasan through a contract with Albania’s Environment Ministry that cost taxpayers 21.6 million euros.
The scandal over the Elbasan plant has since resulted in the jailing of Albania’s then Environment Minister Lefter Koka, found guilty of corruption, money-laundering and profiting in the sum of around five million euros from Albtek and other related companies.
Koka was jailed on two separate set of charges, for five years and eight months in October 2023 over the Elbasan plant, and for six years and eight months in September 2023 for the Fieri plant.
Albania’s government granted three lucrative waste control contracts to a string of interrelated companies.
The companies’ ultimate owners – Mirel Mertiri, his partner, Gugallja, and Klodian Zoto – are now accused of multiple incidences of corruption and money-laundering, along with several government officials, including two ministers.
The three projects envisaging the construction and management of waste treatment plants in Tirana, Fieri and Elbasan together cost at least 150 million euros, according to an estimate based on BIRN’s calculations drawn from government expenditure data and company financial statements.
In 2021, Integrated Energy BV SPV, the company created for the Tirana waste management contract, transferred some 500,000 euros to 3DDD Swiss Trading SA, a company controlled by Dedja in Lugano, Switzerland.
Prosecutors investigating the Tirana contract followed up this suspicious transaction after they also came across indications of close ties between Dedja and Arben Ahmetaj, Albania’s fugitive former deputy prime minister.
Ahmetaj is now on the run after being charged with corruption and money-laundering in related but separate incidents.
Prosecutors suspect the money transferred to Dedja as part of the incinerators deal is financing Ahmetaj’s comfortable life in Switzerland, where he is seeking political asylum.
Prosecutors’ documents, seen by BIRN, say Dedja and Ahmetaj have been friends since their university days in the late 1980s. They have had different lives and careers, however.
Dedja ended up as an emigrant in Italy after dropping out of English studies at university. Ahmetaj meanwhile pursued a career as government official, becoming deputy prime minister with a fat portfolio, including managing the 2019 earthquake reconstruction and the country’s COVID-19 Crisis Response unit.
Ahmetaj fell from grace in summer 2023 after prosecutors identified suspicious transactions of hundreds of thousands of euros in suspected kickbacks.
He left Albania a few days before prosecutors sought his arrest and has been living in Switzerland since September 2023. He has applied for political asylum status there.
Arben Ahmetaj. Photo: LSA
Ahmetaj denies the criminal allegations, claiming to be a victim of a political vendetta organised by Socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama.
According to Ahmetaj, Rama uses organised crime groups to cling to power and has even appointed a special coordinator to act as go-between between his governing Socialist Party and these groups. Rama denies this claim.
While connections between Ahmetaj and Zoto and Mertiri are known, Albania’s Special Prosecution for Organised Crime, SPAK, claims to have found out that Dedja is paying for Ahmetaj’s accommodation in Lugano.
Prosecutors noted that Dedja moved from Italy to Switzerland in 2017 to operate as business consultant. There he registered a company, Drax Consult Sagl, which three years later was linked to a major scandal in Zimbabwe.
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