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Dëgjoni këtë histori
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Inside the Corruption Case Against Belinda Balluku
How the Deputy Prime Minister’s encrypted messages exposed a system of rigged tenders worth hundreds of millions of euros.
TIRANË, Shqipëri — At 9:00 a.m. on November 22, 2025, Belinda Balluku walked through the doors of Albania’s Special Court Against Corruption and Organized Crime with the composure of someone who had spent years navigating the highest corridors of power. The 52-year-old Deputy Prime Minister and Infrastructure Minister — until three days earlier, the second-most powerful official in Albania — spent five hours inside the marble-floored courthouse as judges reviewed evidence that prosecutors say proves she systematically rigged public tenders worth nearly €210 million.
When she emerged shortly after 2 p.m., Balluku brushed past the waiting journalists without a word, her face betraying none of the turmoil that has engulfed Prime Minister Edi Rama’s government. The court’s decision was unequivocal: she would remain suspended from office, barred from leaving the country, and facing charges that could send her to prison for up to a decade.
What brought Balluku to this moment wasn’t a sudden scandal but rather a meticulous investigation into how one of Albania’s most ambitious infrastructure projects — a 5.9-kilometer tunnel through the coastal mountains of Llogara — became a case study in procurement fraud at the highest levels of government.
The evidence, contained in thousands of encrypted Signal messages recovered from a subordinate’s phone, paints a portrait of a minister who didn’t just oversee tenders but orchestrated them from start to finish, prosecutors allege. In one exchange, when the “wrong” company submitted the lowest bid for the €190 million Llogara Tunnel, Balluku’s response was direct: “I think we should cancel it. Disqualify everyone.”
Within hours, the tender was dead. Six months later, it reopened with revised criteria and a predetermined winner: a Turkish consortium whose bid was €12 million higher than the Albanian company that had been eliminated.
From Persecuted Granddaughter to Power Broker
To understand Belinda Balluku’s rise — and her dramatic fall — requires understanding the peculiar alchemy of post-communist Albanian politics, where family histories of persecution can become credentials for power, and loyalty to the prime minister matters more than institutional accountability.
Balluku was born in October 1973 into one of Albania’s most infamous families. Her grandfather, Beqir Balluku, served as Defense Minister under dictator Enver Hoxha for 22 years, part of what Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev called the “troika” of Hoxha, Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu, and Beqir Balluku — “worse than beasts,” in Khrushchev’s formulation, for their role in purging the Communist Party.
But communist loyalty meant nothing when paranoia struck. In July 1974, Hoxha turned on Beqir Balluku, accusing him of plotting a military coup. On November 5, 1975, he was executed by firing squad in a secret tunnel outside Tirana. His body was dumped in an unmarked mass grave. The family wouldn’t recover his remains for 25 years.
Belinda Balluku’s father, Çlirim, was sent to work in bitumen mines. She grew up, by her own account, as “a child raised as an enemy of the people.” The family endured “135 years of prison and exile” collectively, she has said — a biography that, in the moral economy of post-communist Albania, became a form of political capital.
It also made her useful to Edi Rama.
When Rama became Mayor of Tirana in 2000, he was building a new kind of Socialist Party — younger, Western-oriented, shedding the old communist guard. Balluku, with her law degree from Athens, her business administration credentials, and her family’s anti-Hoxha persecution narrative, fit perfectly. She joined his administration in 2004, first as a public relations advisor, then as director of the mayor’s cabinet.
For fifteen years, Balluku was Rama’s operator — the person who coordinated between his vision and the machinery of government. When Rama became Prime Minister in 2013, he appointed her to run ALBCONTROL, Albania’s air navigation agency. When he needed someone to manage the country’s infrastructure boom in 2019, he made her minister. When his previous deputy prime minister, Arben Ahmetaj, fell amid corruption allegations in 2022, Rama elevated Balluku to replace him.
By July 2022, Belinda Balluku controlled more of Albania’s economy than any other official except Rama himself: roads, airports, energy production, electricity distribution. She signed off on contracts worth hundreds of millions of euros. She managed crises, from post-earthquake reconstruction to the 2022 energy shortage. She represented Albania at international forums.
She was, as local media called her, “the most superpowerful” member of Rama’s third-term cabinet.
And according to prosecutors, she used that power to systematically corrupt the tender process.
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The Llogara Tunnel Rigged Tender
The Llogara Tunnel was supposed to be a triumph. For decades, tourists driving south from Tirana to Albania’s pristine beaches faced a white-knuckle journey over the Qafa e Llogarasë — a serpentine mountain road with hairpin turns and sheer drops. The tunnel would cut through the mountain, reducing the trip by 45 minutes and opening Riviera e Shqipërisë to year-round access.
When the Ministry of Infrastructure opened the tender in December 2020, the project carried a budget of 18.9 billion lekë — approximately €157 million at the time. It was one of the largest infrastructure contracts in Albania’s history.
By March 2021, the evaluation committee had a winner: Gjoka Konstruksion, an experienced Albanian firm, with a bid of roughly €140 million.
That’s when Belinda Balluku intervened, according to prosecutors.
The evidence comes from the phone of Evis Berberi, who served as director of the Albanian Road Authority (ARRSH) from 2019 until his arrest in early 2024 on corruption and money laundering charges. Berberi’s BlackBerry contained years of Signal messages between himself and Balluku — encrypted conversations that the two believed would remain private.
They detail a minister not passively receiving briefings, but actively directing every stage of the tender process.
On March 15, 2021, when Balluku learned that Gjoka Konstruksion had won, her message to Berberi was unequivocal: “I think we should cancel it. Disqualify everyone.”
Berberi’s response came within minutes: “I’ll close it… done for today.”
The tender was annulled. The official reason cited “irregularities in the evaluation process” — vague enough to avoid legal challenge, specific enough to justify starting over.
In June 2021, the Ministry reopened the tender with modified technical criteria. This time, the process moved quickly. By August, ARRSH officials were arranging clandestine meetings with representatives from two Turkish construction firms: Intekar Yapi and ASL İnşaat.
“Come on, let’s meet them together because that’s what the boss said,” Berberi wrote to a colleague, referring to an in-person meeting with the Turkish bidders.
Travel records confirm that engineers from Intekar were in Tirana that week. Phone records show multiple calls between ministry officials and the Turkish consortium during the evaluation period — a breach of tender protocols that require arms-length dealings between government and bidders.
In October 2021, the revised tender produced a winner: the joint venture of Intekar Yapi and ASL İnşaat, with a bid of approximately 17 billion lekë — roughly €152 million, about €12 million more than Gjoka Konstruksion’s original offer.
The contract was signed. Construction began in March 2022. The tunnel opened in July 2024, ahead of schedule, a fact the government trumpeted as evidence of effective governance.
But the cost to Albanian taxpayers was more than the official price tag. Prosecutors now allege that the entire second tender was designed to ensure the Turkish consortium won, and that Balluku personally directed the scheme.
In one leaked message, Balluku briefed someone in English about the joint venture’s composition, noting that “this is a company… the President knows, appreciates and uses as a reference” — an apparent reference to high-level political connections that made the Turkish firms preferable.
In another exchange, when the second tender process was underway, Balluku messaged Berberi with specific instructions about evaluation criteria that would need to be met — criteria that, opposition MPs later discovered, closely matched the Turkish consortium’s qualifications while excluding most Albanian competitors.
The Special Prosecution’s indictment describes Balluku as having “followed and guided the entire tendering process — from the preparatory phase to the signing of the contract — illegally interfering… [and] predetermining the winners.”
The Turkish consortium has not been charged with any wrongdoing. Albanian law allows prosecution of public officials who rig tenders without necessarily charging the companies that benefit — though prosecutors say the investigation is ongoing.
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The Ring Road Scandal
The Llogara Tunnel was not an isolated incident.
In September 2021, while the Llogara tender was underway, Balluku’s ministry opened bids for Lot 4 of the Tirana Outer Ring Road — a 16-kilometer highway segment circling the capital, budgeted at 2.09 billion lekë (approximately €17 million).
This project had troubled history. An earlier tender in 2018 had been canceled amid a fraud scandal involving a phantom company called DH Albania that won contracts despite having no construction experience. That affair forced the resignation of Balluku’s predecessor and became a campaign issue for the opposition.
When Balluku’s ministry rebid Lot 4 in 2021, the evaluation criteria were highly specific — so specific that opposition MP Jorida Tabaku later noted they seemed “custom-written” for a particular consortium.
That consortium — Euroteorema Peqin, Pe-Vla-Ku, and Nova Construction 2012 — won with a bid of 2.4 billion lekë (€19.9 million), about 15% above budget.
According to the Special Prosecution, the tender criteria had been tailored to match the profile of these three companies while effectively excluding competitors. The technical requirements, financial thresholds, and experience prerequisites aligned almost perfectly with what this consortium could offer.
Prosecutors have now expanded Balluku’s indictment to include charges related to the Ring Road tender, alleging it followed the same pattern as Llogara: predetermined winners, manipulated criteria, and ministry officials coordinating with bidders behind closed doors.
The three Albanian companies that won the Ring Road contract have not been charged. Attempts to reach their leadership for comment were unsuccessful.
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The €4,450 Airport Mystery
Perhaps the most brazen transaction in Balluku’s portfolio didn’t involve a tender at all — it happened after one was already won.
In 2021, the Ministry of Infrastructure awarded a concession to build Aeroporti Ndërkombëtar i Vlorës, Albania’s second international airport, to a consortium that included two Albanian companies (Mabco Construction and 2A Group) and a Turkish firm (YDA Group). The Turkish company held a 40% stake in the €700 million project — a share ostensibly worth €280 million.
According to official documents reviewed by opposition MP Gazment Bardhi, YDA Group’s 40% stake was sold to the Albanian partners in June 2025 for €4,450.
Four thousand, four hundred and fifty euros. Less than the price of a used Honda Civic. For 40% of a €700 million airport concession.
Bardhi, head of the Democratic Party’s parliamentary group, alleges that Balluku approved this transaction in writing and raised no objections — despite the obvious red flag that a stake supposedly worth hundreds of millions was changing hands for pocket change.
“Only someone involved from the start in the corrupt scheme could remain silent at that moment,” Bardhi said in a November 2025 parliamentary speech, brandishing the documents.
The transaction suggests, Bardhi argues, that YDA Group was never a real partner — it was included in the original consortium solely to meet the experience requirements of the tender (Turkish firms have built numerous airports; the Albanian companies had not). Once the concession was secured, YDA exited for a nominal fee, leaving the Albanian partners in full control.
Bardhi has also alleged — though without providing documentary proof — that Balluku has “family ties on paper” with one of the Albanian concession companies, implying a direct conflict of interest.
Balluku has not publicly addressed the airport transaction. The companies involved did not respond to requests for comment. The Special Prosecution has not brought charges related to the airport concession, though opposition figures have called for an investigation.
The Ministry of Infrastructure issued a statement in August 2025 defending the Vlora Airport project as “vital for Albania’s tourism development” and dismissing opposition allegations as “politically motivated distortions.”
The System Behind the Scandals
Belinda Balluku did not invent corruption in Albanian infrastructure. She inherited a system designed for it.
Albania’s public procurement framework, despite reforms required for EU accession, remains vulnerable to manipulation at multiple points:
First, tender committees are appointed by ministries, not independent bodies. This means the minister effectively controls who evaluates bids. In Balluku’s case, she appointed loyalists like Evis Berberi to key positions in ARRSH, giving her indirect control over the entire road-building apparatus.
Second, canceling tenders is easy and common. Albanian law allows tenders to be annulled if the ministry claims “irregularities” occurred — a vague standard that’s difficult to challenge legally. This gives ministers a reset button: if the “wrong” company wins, cancel and restart with revised criteria.
Third, there is no real-time oversight. The Supreme State Audit reviews contracts after they’re signed. The Special Prosecution investigates years later, if at all. During the tender process itself, there is no independent authority monitoring for favoritism or collusion.
Fourth, technical criteria can be customized for each project. This is sometimes legitimate — different projects have different needs. But it also allows ministries to write requirements that only favored companies can meet, creating the illusion of competition where none exists.
Balluku mastered this system. According to prosecutors, she would:
- Appoint trusted officials to evaluation committees
- Use early-stage consultations to learn which companies were preparing bids
- Cancel tenders if unexpected winners emerged
- Revise criteria to favor predetermined winners in the restart
- Maintain encrypted communications with subordinates to coordinate the scheme
- Meet bidders informally before contract awards
This wasn’t crude bribery. It was sophisticated procurement manipulation — the kind that requires technical knowledge, institutional control, and political protection.
Which is why, for years, it worked.
The Energy Crisis and the “Tigers”
Infrastructure tenders were not Balluku’s only domain of alleged misconduct. As Energy Minister, she managed Albania’s response to the Europe-wide power crisis of 2021-2022, when drought reduced hydroelectric output and soaring natural gas prices made electricity imports prohibitively expensive.
In late 2021, facing potential blackouts, Balluku authorized the emergency rental of two floating thermal power plants — massive generator ships nicknamed “Tigri 1” and “Tigri 2” (the Tigers) — to be moored in the Bay of Vlora. The ships would burn diesel to produce electricity, filling the gap until hydropower recovered.
The deal was controversial from the start. Opposition leader Sali Berisha claimed that “millions of euros went missing” in the Tigers arrangement, alleging that the rental fees were inflated and that the ships sat idle for months while still incurring costs.
Investigative reporting by Albanian outlets later revealed that the contract topped $68 million over 18 months — an enormous sum for a temporary measure. The Supreme State Audit examined the deal but its findings have not been made public.
Balluku defended the Tigers repeatedly in parliament, arguing that the alternative was widespread blackouts that would have crippled the economy. “You can criticize the cost,” she told opposition MPs in a heated February 2022 session, “but you cannot criticize the outcome: Albania’s lights stayed on.”
The Tigers case has not resulted in criminal charges, but it exemplifies a pattern in Balluku’s tenure: emergency measures that bypassed normal procurement rules, direct negotiations with suppliers, and contracts that benefited a narrow circle of companies.
Whether these were necessary crisis responses or opportunities for corruption depends on which narrative you believe — and on evidence that may never become public if prosecutors decline to pursue charges.
Rama’s Impossible Choice
On November 21, 2025, Prime Minister Edi Rama faced a choice that every authoritarian-leaning leader eventually confronts: defend his institutions or defend his people.
He chose his people.
Hours after the Special Court ordered Balluku suspended from office, Rama held a press conference alongside visiting EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos. Instead of expressing disappointment or pledging to respect judicial independence, Rama launched into a blistering attack on the court and prosecutors.
“This is a brutal interference with the executive power,” Rama declared. “I am not aware that in any country in Europe a prosecutor and a judge can decide that a minister should be suspended from duty.”
(Legal experts immediately noted that several European countries, including France, Italy, and Romania, have laws allowing judges to suspend officials under investigation for corruption. Rama’s claim was demonstrably false.)
Rama announced that his government would challenge the suspension in Albania’s Constitutional Court, framing the issue as a separation-of-powers crisis rather than a corruption case.
“The court and the prosecution have taken on the competences of the prime minister, parliament, and president,” Rama said, his voice rising. “We cannot accept this extreme act of arbitrariness.”
The EU Commissioner sitting beside him said nothing.
Rama’s defiance was not just rhetoric. Within days, his government formally petitioned the Constitutional Court to overturn Balluku’s suspension. Legal analysts give the appeal little chance of success — Albanian law explicitly allows preventive measures against officials under investigation — but the move buys time and sends a message: this government will fight for its own.
The question is why.
If Balluku is guilty and Rama is clean, the politically smart move is obvious: express regret, accept the suspension, let justice take its course, and move on. Rama’s refusal to do so suggests one of three possibilities:
First, Balluku has leverage. As opposition MP Gazment Bardhi put it: “Belinda is blackmailing him with joint affairs of abuse of power.” If Balluku was directing corrupt tenders, she was almost certainly doing so with Rama’s knowledge or blessing. Her prosecution threatens to expose him.
Second, this is about system preservation, not personal loyalty. If Balluku can be suspended by a judge, so can any minister. Rama may fear that allowing this precedent will embolden prosecutors to target his entire cabinet, destabilizing the government.
Third, Rama genuinely believes the courts overstepped. In this reading, he sees SPAK and GJKKO — institutions created under Western pressure — as quasi-colonial impositions that threaten Albanian sovereignty. By fighting them, he positions himself as a defender of national independence against foreign meddling.
The most likely answer: all three are true.
What’s clear is that Rama has made a decision with profound consequences. By publicly attacking Albania’s anti-corruption institutions just months after the EU opened all accession clusters with Albania, he has put Brussels in an impossible position.
The EU demanded that Albania create independent prosecution and courts to fight high-level corruption. Albania did. Those institutions are now prosecuting the Deputy Prime Minister. And the Prime Minister is calling it illegitimate.
If Brussels supports Rama, it signals that anti-corruption reforms are negotiable when politically inconvenient. If Brussels supports SPAK, it risks alienating the government it needs as a partner for EU integration.
Albania’s path to Europe runs through this case. And nobody knows where it leads.
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What Happens Next
As of late November 2025, Belinda Balluku remains a member of parliament but cannot exercise ministerial functions. She is barred from leaving Albania. Her trial date has not been set.
The Special Prosecution continues to investigate. Sources close to the case say additional charges may be forthcoming, possibly including allegations that Balluku participated in a “structured criminal group” — Albanian legal terminology for organized crime — which would significantly increase potential prison time.
Prosecutors are also examining other projects under Balluku’s tenure, including the Vlora Airport concession and several road contracts with cost overruns exceeding 100% of original budgets.
Balluku has maintained her innocence throughout. In her last public statement before suspension, delivered in parliament on November 19, she called the allegations “mudslinging, insinuations, half-truths and lies” and insisted she would be exonerated.
“I trust the justice system,” she told the chamber. “I believe in transparency, accountability, and above all, in the principles of unchanging justice.”
Her defense team, led by her sister Pamela Qirko (herself a former member of Albania’s Independent Qualification Commission for vetting judges), has signaled they will challenge the admissibility of the Signal message evidence, arguing that some conversations may have been taken out of context or improperly obtained.
They are also expected to argue that Balluku’s actions, even if irregular, do not rise to the level of criminal conduct — that she was making judgment calls within her authority as minister, not orchestrating a criminal conspiracy.
The trial will test not just Balluku’s guilt but the strength of Albania’s new justice institutions. SPAK, created in 2019 with U.S. and EU backing, has indicted several high-level officials but secured few major convictions. Critics worry it is better at generating headlines than winning cases.
If Balluku is acquitted, it will raise serious questions about whether Albania’s anti-corruption drive is producing more spectacle than substance.
If she is convicted, it will prove that even a deputy prime minister can be held accountable — a historic first for Albania.
And if the case drags on for years in a legal limbo of appeals and procedural delays, as so many Albanian corruption cases do, it will suggest that the system is designed to perform accountability rather than deliver it.
The Legacy of a Fall
Belinda Balluku’s story is, in many ways, the story of post-communist Albania itself: a country where persecution under dictatorship became political capital in democracy; where Western education and technical competence opened doors to power; where loyalty to a strongman leader mattered more than institutional norms; and where the line between development and corruption became impossible to distinguish.
She built roads and airports. She kept the lights on during an energy crisis. She represented Albania on international stages with competence and confidence.
She also, prosecutors allege, systematically corrupted the tender process to benefit favored companies, costing Albanian taxpayers tens of millions of euros in inflated contracts.
Both things can be true. In Albania, they often are.
What makes Balluku’s case different is not the scale of the alleged corruption — Albania has seen worse. It’s that for the first time, the institutions designed to fight corruption are functioning, even when it means confronting the highest levels of government.
Whether they can survive that confrontation will determine not just Belinda Balluku’s fate, but Albania’s future as it seeks to join the European Union.
On a cold November morning in Tirana, as Balluku walked out of the Special Court into a crowd of journalists and onlookers, that future remained uncertain.
The most powerful woman in Albanian politics had fallen. The question now is whether anyone else will follow — and whether the system that enabled her rise and fall will finally change.
Or whether, as so often in Albania, the spectacle of accountability will prove more powerful than accountability itself.
Documents referenced in this story, including tender records, court filings, and leaked messages, were reviewed by AlbaniaVisit.com’s investigative team. Signal message excerpts have been translated from Albanian to English.
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