US Ambassador in Tirana and Albania’s Attorney General have started a war of accusations and counteraccusations today. Donald Lu said Adriatik Llalla has always been against the Judiciary Reform, while the later responded immediately by accusing Lu of threaten and blackmail, reaching to the point of revoking Llalla’s wife visa.

Where does all this conflict between the Attorney General and one of the most powerful ambassadors come from?

They have repeatedly said they differ in the way they see the Judiciary Reform, but the real reason for their enmity is elsewhere.

On the eve of creating the Vetting institutions, last November, Adriatik Llalla ordered the blockage of the archives of ILDKPKI (High Inspectorate of Declarations and Control of Wealth and Conflicts of Interests), after an investigation had started against the head of the Institution, Shkëlqim Ganaj. The investigation started because the Prosecution Office had strong reasons to believe Ganaj had violated the law, avoiding deliberately investigating many cases of conflict of interests of several Members of Parliament, who had made business with state’s budget money. Llalla’s sudden move alarmed Rama, who knows pretty well how many deputies and officials have become rich and why they have been careful in their of declarations to ILDKPKI.

The most interesting part in this history is that the investigation should also have included several deputies who were summoned or contacted by the US Embassy in the time when Edi Rama, with the strong support from Ambassador Lu, aimed to pass the Judiciary Reform without the opposition votes, trying to create by all means an absolute majority.

The unusual intervention from the Prosecution Office and efforts to block the whole electronic and physical archives alarmed the prime minister and was considered by Lu, as he repeated today, as an effort to bock using the archives in the Vetting process. Llalla has been ILDKPKI chief for a long time and knows very well what a “treasure” the archive is, containing thousands of wealth declarations not only from the politicians and high officials, but also from judges and prosecutors, since 2004.

It is a known fact that Rama, despite failing after sending to Venice a “Fatmir Xhafaj” draft of the Reform, has non renounced from his efforts to have as much control as possible in the Vetting institutions. That very archive will be one of the main sources of the decisions of the Vetting Commission, to see the purity of the figure of judges and prosecutors. That is the “bush” where the “rabbit” hides and the reason why Rama, supported by Lu, could not allow “a second side” to have access there.

“In November and December, the prosecutors tried and failed to sequester the ILDKPI server and computers, which are fundamental for the Vetting”, Lu said today, enlightening for the first time publically on this huge clash, which had started since the end of the last year.

In that time, Shkëlqim Ganaj, who is known as Rama’s loyal pawn, refused to handle the server, but the Prosecution Office did not surrender and issued a sequester order, which was not executed, because Rama and Tahiri’s police refused to cooperate. At the same time, ILDKPKI headed to the court, which brought down the Prosecution request, explaining that, in the case of an investigation against Ganaj, the Prosecution could block and sequester the declarations of the politicians and officials who were suspected for conflict of interest, but not the whole archive.

Rama and Lu never forgave Llalla for his failed operation, which was the last drop in a glass already full of other cases in different times that has brought the Attorney General against the two. Rightfully or not, it doesn’t really matter.

SYRI.net