Gysi, Bela, Lali and Klodi as Masks of One and the Same Man

By ANDI BUSHATI

If the Agasi–Vlora–Proda triangle were turned into a film screenplay, most of the audience would walk out of the theater smirking — the plot would look too contrived to be true. But in the story between the crime coordinator, the head of SHISH and the General Director of Police, reality outdoes imagination. With the power he had accumulated, Ergys Agasi could double the budget of a tender with a single word, he could pocket over 40 million euros a year through a phantom company with no employees, he could create or erase property titles — but above all, with the police chief and the chief spymaster under his thumb, he could order kidnappings and, having carried all of this out successfully, open a bottle of Romanée-Conti in his butterfly-decorated office and badmouth the heads of the institutions he had secretly filmed during the day.

Although this fable may seem to border on the unimaginable, in roughly similar fashion it has been repeated in other cases.

Those who have had the chance to read in full Belinda Balluku’s conversations with Vis Berberi find frightening stories there. Between the way she decided who got tenders and her handling of romantic dalliances with collaborators, she displayed an unlimited power that came from treating millions like pocket change. Signing away 50 million euros on the Llogara tunnel with a stroke of the pen, excluding a British company from the race at Vlora airport and then kicking out of the game those she had handed it to at the expense of the former, she embodied the behavior of someone who fears no accountability. Only this explains the division of the ring-road tenders, the exclusion of companies from competitions, and the orders to the boys who were supposed to buy the media with cash.

The same is the model of Erion Veliaj, whether with the companies that coughed up money at Ajola’s artistic associations, or with the 5D directors who channeled over 22 million euros of the municipality’s enormous budget directly into their own private companies, to build with it “strategic investor” hotels, where employees believed even Lali himself was a shareholder.

And if you go further, to the non-existent incinerators that have swallowed nearly half a billion euros, you will realize that part of the money for burners that were never completed went either to buying media, or to the PS campaign, or to offshore accounts that had nothing to do with the purpose for which the funds had left the budget. This story — which will truly turn into a shocking international production — confirms what everyone knew without having the facts in hand: namely, what the missing money was actually for.

In this sense, however different they may be from one another — whether Gysi or Bela, whether Lali or one of the Klods of the incinerators — their trajectories converge at a single point. Regardless of the means they use or the methods they choose, they share the same goal. It doesn’t matter if they are rivals or enemies, if they insult or fight each other — what unites them is the aim to extort and plunder every last penny of Albanians.

As such, although they may have profiles unlike one another, they must be seen as part of the whole. They are nothing but masks of different colors of one and the same man — the one who conceived, accepted and licensed the massive robbery plan.

So whenever the naive question flashes through our minds of how it was possible that the country’s chief policeman and chief spymaster obeyed like common pawns an anonymous gigolo with no formal function or power, we must not stop at the protagonist triangle of this unbelievable scenario. It cannot be explained unless we become aware of the bigger plan, unless we see it simply as a fragment of a project set beyond and above it. Only then does the enigma become simple — when you frame it alongside the stories of Saimir Tahiri, Ilir Beqaj, Lefter Koka, Erion Veliaj and Belinda Balluku. Only then does it cease to be a fable in which fantasy kills truth, and becomes simply the reality of a band of vulgar robbers who, for thirteen years, have had the theft of this country as their project — a commentary first published by Lapsi.al.