Berisha, meetings in Congress
27/04/2012

The Albanian Prime Minister, Sali Berisha, expressed his readiness to discuss a series of issues with the opposition, such as the election of the President, the justice system, the immunity of officials, etc.

Berisha expressed his stance in an interview for “VOA”, where he initially commented his meeting with the US State Secretary, Hillary Clinton, who made a very clear request.

“I informed the US State Secretary for the recent political developments in Albania. Secretary Clinton clearly asked for the immunity to be removed”, Berisha declared.

Then the head of the Albanian government answered to a series of questions related with the actual hot political matters in Albania.

The justice system:

“The US government helps Albania, but this is a responsibility of the Albanian government and the political forces to intensify the efforts for improving the rule of law and war against corruption, so that we can make some steps ahead. When we speak about justice reforms, we speak about the interest of the Albanian citizens and not the politicians’ interest”.

Corruption: “Based on the initiative taken by President Obama, we are among the few governments that give online concessions. I am not saying that there is no corruption, but there is also a strong will for fighting it. Albania has more punished officials than every other country. There were no high-rank officials, but for this we must remove the immunity first”.

The electoral system: “This electoral system ends a series of inappropriate geographic problems. The political parties have not asked the system to change, and the math experts are working on the calculations”.

The Presidential Election: “The presidential election is a process that must go through consults and we are ready to do this with the opposition. This problem will be in the next month, and I wish that there will be good will from both parties. Fatos Nano? When I have formed the government, I declared that I am open for consults, and I am decided to implement the Constitution. In 2008 we changed the Constitution with Mr. Rama for avoiding a political crisis during the Presidential elections.

Kosovo-Albania powerline: “The distinction between the project for the new Parliament and the construction of the power-line is very large. For this object there was no jury for the price. If you see the 12 projects that were presented in the Parliament, they vary from 48 to 100 million EUR. The jury had professors from Harward and the entire world chose the project of Mr. Priks.

When the Jury chooses the best project, they don’t take the price in consideration. As for the powerline, the German KFW Bank is a wonderful bank that has funded dozens of projects in Albania. We have very good relations with them. In this present case, we made the the Tirana-Prishtina tender and that for the Southern Ring.

For the first, a company that fulfills the technical conditions has offered 8.6 million EUR for the Albanian segment. If the Kosovo segment is concluded, it is 20 million EUR cheaper. While for the Southern Ring there was an offer that was 20 million EUR more expensive”.