Old greed for army properties on the coast

2022-05-30 17:27:12Fokus SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

Old greed for army properties on the coast

Defence Minister Niko Peleshi during the responses he gave in the interview called by PD MP Ferdinand Abdeshaj removed from himself the responsibility of shredding army properties on the coast in suspicious spheres, which have also been indicted in the SPAK.

However, the most blatant case of how these properties are being robbed is the one at The St. John's Naval Base. In June 2020, when the country was still under Covid's restrictive measures, a private company forcibly breached the surrounding fence to build on behalf of the heir to the land, which was equipped with regular construction permits.

It took a year of clashes and reports for this construction, for Defence Minister Niko Peleshi to order the Military Police in March 2021 to secure the St. John's Naval Base.

Construction began on this base after the extraction of property from the 2014 Armed Forces spread plan. However, leaving out of this plan did not necessarily translate into them no longer army property. Legally, their status was still military property, but simply left out of the army's expansion territory.

This means that the heir to the property within the base could not claim its receipt there, but under the law for the return and compensation of the former owners had to either be compensated in monetary amounts, or with property elsewhere.

The man who first denounced the alienation of army properties is former Navy Commander Arthur Mechollari. He has charged that as Defence Minister in 2019, Olta Xhaka had called her to the office to allow a private construction of her friends in Cape Paul.

"Regarding this initiative of the minister I have been blunt with the answer. I couldn't get involved for all the reasons. First, because Cape Paul's Base has a first-hand operational importance... Furthermore, in 2012, I was released from the Armed Forces, precisely why I protected the Cape Paul Base from implementing an alleged corruption project of the predecessor government," he says.

According to him, the investment plan was a yacht port.

"I couldn't agree. Defence Minister Xhaka's request for investment in Cape Paul Naval Base was a personal and non-state initiative. However, even if it were state, it contradicted the operational concept of the Naval Force. The Base of Cape Pal is one of the two main bases of the Naval Force/CoastGuard, in one of the main directions of threats, due to the presence near the Port of Durres, the largest port in Albania", he has confessed.

Mechollari was the same one who in 2012 was dismissed from office because he opposed the passage of army property to the notorious client of the Berisha Government at the time, Damir Fazlic.


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