Who is killing the defense industry?

No shipment, no payment, no state order. A middleman’s boasting, the word “Israeli” and a Defense Minister who was never in the room. Three weeks later, the defense industry of a NATO member country has been pronounced guilty by all three.

By Drizan Shala

On September 19, on the 112th day of the protest in Tirana, an activist told the crowd that Ron Yeffet had been heard on a recording admitting to his partners that Edi Rama had hired him for the dirty work. By then, two party leaders, one television station, thirty-nine MPs and several hundred accounts on X had repeated that sentence for twelve days. Yeffet never said it. What he said, in English, to three foreign business contacts in an office in Tirana in January, was: “the government took us over because all the bad thing we could do.” A middleman’s boasting, in a middleman’s grammar, about a deal that never happened. On that sentence, within three weeks, the country built an international arms-trafficking scandal in a NATO member state.

There is no arms-trafficking operation in this recording. There is a middleman talking, politicians amplifying him, media turning conjecture into fact, and a defense industry barely two years old branded as criminal before anyone had produced a shipment, a license, a buyer, a seller, a payment or a state order. In intelligence work, every step from information to assessment must survive one question: what changed in the evidence? Here, nothing changed in the evidence. Only the verbs changed.

The recording was broadcast on September 7 on Syri TV, released from Switzerland by Arben Ahmetaj, a former deputy prime minister charged by SPAK with corruption and money laundering in the incinerators case and internationally wanted since 2023. He released seven cut segments, with subtitles, in an order he described on air with the words “the production has been prepared.” The full recording lasts about three hours; the public has heard perhaps twelve minutes. The company in whose offices the recording was made, DEL-CNG, later confirmed through its lawyer that the meeting had taken place on its premises and that the recording had been made without authorization. The recording is authentic. Authenticity was never the question.

The question is what Yeffet says, and what he says is very little. A new company will be “80 or 90 percent” his contacts and “10 or 20” the government’s, under “the same concept, but not KAYO.” For a government contact he mentions a deputy secretary general of the Prime Minister’s Office, whose name comes back to him late. Ermal Nufi was not in the room and nothing in the recording shows he knew the meeting was taking place. The name of an official, mentioned before three strangers, is a middleman’s working tool and does not make the official a party to a deal; every middleman in this trade keeps such a name in his repertoire. The contacts are to hold their shares in “an American corporation,” so that “we close them, the American embassy.” In Africa there is “a very, very good business, hundreds of millions” in ammunition; he has “three in Nigeria and in Sudan”; when asked where the packing would be done, he answers: “I thought Albania”; when asked whether Africa is “with KAYO, of course,” he answers: “we don’t know that.” After an opposition television show, “I became a minister,” and “they said I took 3 million euros, show me the money.” To one of the men he says: “I know you don’t care about money, but you are a very rich man,” and then: “but I want to become rich.” And when the woman translating proposes an official letter to the Ministry of Energy about a gas field, he stops her: “no official letter,” “rely on me,” “go to Vlora and do what you want, then I’ll deal with them.”

That last exchange Tirana published as proof of his influence. It shows the opposite, and there lies the essence of the recording. A man who has a ministry in his pocket makes a phone call. A man who does not, tells his partners to go and see for themselves and to leave his name out of it. The Ministry of Energy never answered Yeffet. Two months after the meeting, the field he was talking about, Delvina, passed 75 percent to a Dutch buyer; the tax administration blocked further transfers the next day and the American chargé d’affaires visited the area that same week. Whatever he was selling in January, the state did not buy it.

In the recording: “we don’t know that.” In the country: “with KAYO.” In the recording: “I thought Albania.” In the country: a consolidated Africa–Albania line. In the recording: three people called by name. In the country, from September 8, two Ukrainian defense figures named, with corruption files in their own country, supplied by a journalist in a social media post and copied by every portal without verification, until “Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking,” Ahmetaj’s own description, became “a Ukrainian and a Russian.” In the recording: a middleman with a minority stake in one of six joint ventures. In the country: the criminal capture of an industry, into which the Elbit contract was also folded — a government-to-government matter with its own real problem — so that “the Israelis” could become plural. “Could” became “did.” “I thought” became “he organized.” “I don’t know” became “KAYO.” A conversation became a line, the line became trafficking and the trafficking became state policy. This is how a narrative is fabricated, and every step can be dated to the hour: Ahmetaj’s account on the 7th; Bardhi’s “national security” and Këlliçi’s “Ermal Rocket” on the 8th; the thirty-nine MPs on the 8th, admitting in their own request that the materials “are not considered by the requesters as proven facts”; the names on the 8th; “behind them are powerful services of European partner countries” on the 11th; Berisha’s sentence that “a NATO member country is carrying out an ugly smuggling” the following week; the crowd on the 19th; and on the 23rd the same names were attached to the arrest of the intelligence chief, so that Yeffet, Ergys Agasi and Vlora Hyseni could be presented as if they had the same job description. None of these steps required a document. The majority voted down the request for an investigative commission; SPAK asked Syri TV for the raw audio, the only proper institutional action in this whole affair, and that request remains open.

Something else also changed while the verbs were changing. In the recording, Yeffet is a man with three passports, one of them Albanian since 2018. In the country, from the first night, he was “the Israeli”: “the Israeli fixer,” “Rama’s Israeli,” “the Israeli fraudster,” and in one outlet “Edi Rama’s Jewish friend.” Ahmetaj, on air, presented a second, unidentified partner in the health sector as “another Israeli,” and the KAYO model as something that would be done “with the Israeli.” A journalist, identifying the foreign voices, added about the wife of one of the men that she was “of Jewish origin,” a detail that serves nothing but this template. The Elbit contract, a publicly listed company with no documented link to Yeffet, was attached to him only through that word, so that “the Israelis” could become plural, and their industry with them. For three weeks, no one ever called him what his passport says, an Albanian middleman, because behind an “Albanian middleman” no one sees a hidden hand. This is the oldest conspiratorial grammar in Europe: a Jew behind the ruler, with a power derived from origin, because it cannot be proven by deeds. Tirana’s political class borrowed it without noticing, in a country that sheltered Jews while its neighbors handed them over, and used it for three weeks as a substitute for evidence. Origin did the work that evidence could not, and that is called antisemitism, whatever the intentions of those it suited.

In the defense trade, “Israeli” is not a danger sign; it is a brand you find in every catalogue. Israeli systems are tested in war year after year and fixed according to what comes out, which is why NATO countries buy them openly and in bulk: Germany the Arrow 3, Finland David’s Sling, Britain the Watchkeeper, Greece the Herons and the Spikes. A small member, with Cold War factories, no design base and a ten-year commitment to produce ammunition together with Ukraine, has every reason to seek an Israeli technology partner. A middleman who says he knows people in Tel Aviv offers exactly what it is looking for. Every procurement office would listen to such an offer. The construct turned the same word into proof of a hidden hand.

If the scandal is that defense companies work with middlemen, then close Farnborough, Eurosatory and half the offices around the Pentagon. This trade runs on representatives, consultants, agents, former officials and people who inflate their circle of acquaintances. What they are authorized to do — that is a question for the compliance office. What transaction they have carried out — that is a question for the prosecutor. For three weeks Tirana has been taking the first question as proof of the second.

This trade runs on middlemen. Governments do not sell each other mortars over the counter; between the ministry and the factory stand agents, representatives, retired officers, consultants and people who earn their living knowing who picks up their phone calls. They sell the promise of what they can arrange, and the client decides whether to buy it. That is the trade, legal wherever there is a defense industry. Yeffet is one of them. He holds American, Israeli and Albanian citizenship, has done business in New York, Dakar and Tirana, and on June 17, 2025 he took 49 percent of TIMAK, a vehicle body company, seven weeks before TIMAK and the state company KAYO created Timak Defence. In January, in an office in Tirana, he was telling three foreign contacts what he could arrange in Albania. The recording contains nothing but that offer. Whether anyone bought it is another question, and the documents say the Ministry of Energy did not.

KAYO is two years old. It is wholly owned by the Ministry of Defense and was created to revive Poliçan, Gramsh and Mjekës with joint ventures in which the state keeps a minority and the partner brings the capital and the know-how. There are six of them. Yeffet entered one of them, and it does not appear that anyone defined what he was allowed to say on KAYO’s behalf after he entered. The company is new and in a hurry, vets its partners poorly and treats transparency as a nuisance. So a middleman was left to describe the state company in his own words, while the public had nothing against which to check those words. It is a managerial failure, and it was visible in the business register long before September 7. The audio added no fact to it.

It added one sentence, and the sentence did the damage. An uninstructed partner is an administrative failure. An arms line with Sudan is a crime. The distance between the two is the distance between a middleman talking as if the building were his and the building actually belonging to him, and in the public account that distance vanished.

The government’s answers were as weak as the accusation. The Defense Minister, Ermal Nufi, entering a party meeting: “What arms trafficking? Are you in your right mind?”, and, when asked whether he had listened to the recording: “Am I going to listen to the whole world’s wiretaps?” The Minister for Relations with Parliament said it disgusted her to respond to the statements of a fugitive from justice. The head of KAYO explained on television that the factories have zero production and, consequently, zero capacity to pack anything. Nobody explained what a partner in a state defense venture is and is not allowed to say on its behalf — the only thing a serious partner wanted clarified.

The minister deserves a clearer sentence than the one that came out of the doorstep exchange with journalists. Nufi appears in this recording only once, as a name a middleman throws at three strangers as the person who “will make contact” after something passes through the government. He was not present. No message from him, no meeting with him, no action of his appears anywhere in the three hours. The joint venture in which Yeffet holds a stake was created in August 2025, under Nufi’s predecessor, six months before Nufi took over the ministry. The deal the recording actually concerns, a gas field, belonged to another ministry, which never answered Yeffet. The nickname the country has amused itself with for three weeks, “Ermal Rocket,” rests on a single anonymous anecdote relayed from Switzerland by a man under an arrest warrant, about a conversation no one else claims to have heard. SPAK, which has the recordings, has not named any official. On the evidence, Nufi’s part in this affair is that he was mentioned by a salesman and inherited the file. If a middleman’s name-dropping is proof of a minister’s involvement, then no minister in the Alliance is clean, because every middleman drops names; that is the product he sells.

Abroad, this story did not exist. Reuters, AFP and AP did not publish it. BIRN, which had covered Ahmetaj’s own SPAK file in detail and closely covers Israeli arms in the region, did not publish it; its September roundups on Albania opened with the intelligence chief’s house arrest and the word NATO in the headline. Haaretz, which first reported the Elbit contract in November, did not touch it. On X, the story peaked on the second day with 31 thousand views for one post and then shrank into a circle of four accounts linking to each other, while party posts drew single-digit likes. The only foreign institution that wrote about it was a Balkan disinformation monitor, which on September 25 listed the KAYO affair as a case “likely to feed competing narratives,” with one side presenting the claims as fact and the other dismissing the questions as fabricated. No major international outlet reported the material as evidence that Albania was running an arms-trafficking network.

The recording was not born as evidence of an Albanian arms operation. According to the reconstruction Tirana Examiner has made of the material’s provenance, it was recorded on a phone by one of the participants, the one heard closest to the microphone from start to finish. The aim, according to this reconstruction, was for Yeffet to say that the government stood behind his approach to Delvina Gas, because the meeting was about Delvina; the commission came from the side of the field’s then owner, Sokol Meqemeja. Meqemeja is an old friend of Ahmetaj’s, and his circle appears in SPAK’s file on Ahmetaj, over a 140 thousand euro loan that turned into an apartment in Selita. From three hours of a middleman’s words there emerged no minister, no instruction, no money; there emerged only the name of a deputy secretary general. According to the same findings, the material was offered through an intermediary to a German service and was refused because there was nothing usable in it. Only afterwards did it reach a television station, through the friend. The trap missed its target. By chance it caught a middleman boasting about arms in front of arms-trade people, and this material found a market on the 100th day of a protest. A recording made to prove the state stood behind one man’s deal was published to prove the state was running a criminal scheme.

I do not need to know who ordered the fire to say what is burning. The target now is not Ron Yeffet. The target is the very idea that Albania can build a defense industry.

The beneficiaries rank from the smallest to the largest, and each is visible. The smallest are the parties to a gas field and a fugitive who needed to be a witness, not a defendant. Above them, an opposition that took the file handed to it on the hundredth day of the protest. Outside Albania is the region’s established competitor: Serbia, which exports ammunition in bulk, assembles Israeli drones at home, keeps Chinese air defense and is expanding cooperation with Beijing in the defense industry and technology transfer. An Albanian ammunition line does not enter an empty market; every contract Tirana loses can be taken by someone else. None of this shows that Belgrade ordered a recording in Tirana, nor does it need to. Strategic effect does not require central direction. This newsroom knows more than it publishes about the foreign interests that would prefer an Albanian defense industry not to exist, and about the people in Tirana who have made themselves useful to them. It is measuring that material by the same standard it just used for the recording.

Albania spent years convincing allies that it could be more than a security consumer: that it could produce, repair, supply and, in time, export. That requires technology partners, insurers, banks, licenses and governments willing to put their names next to Albanian factories. Then came twelve minutes of edited audio and a political-media machine that turned a middleman’s boasting into the accusation that the defense industry of a NATO country was an international trafficking enterprise. A senior defense official has confirmed to Tirana Examiner that foreign partners have since requested additional compliance checks and that at least one signing has been postponed. Compliance departments abroad do not watch Syri TV, but they read that a prosecutor has asked a television station for recordings about a company they are about to sign with, and their questions come with dates.

No shipment has been shown. No payment has been shown. No end-user document has been shown. No government order has been shown. No Sudan–Albania line has been shown. The words “arms trafficking” have appeared everywhere. This is how a defense industry is damaged without firing at a factory.

If Albania discovers that foreign partners no longer want their names on the door, the people who fabricated conviction from this recording should not ask who destroyed the industry. They should play the recording once more. This time, they should listen to themselves.

Drizan Shala is a security scholar and a doctoral candidate at the University of Sarajevo. He writes on defense, private security and the security architecture of the Western Balkans.

This article was first published by Tirana Examiner.