The Balkans and High-Level Corruption: Big Fish Arrested, Yet Still Swimming

Many remember the events of 21 October in Albania, when former head of state Ilir Meta was arrested in spectacular fashion. In a cinematic arrest, masked police officers intercepted his car, forcibly pulled him out and arrested him on three counts of a corruption indictment, each linked to his time in high government office. Today, the leader of the Freedom Party (formerly the Socialist Movement for Integration) awaits trial on charges brought by the Special Prosecution Office (SPAK) that could keep the former president behind bars for decades.

Albania is also in the spotlight these days in its eastern neighbour, North Macedonia, whose former senior government official Artan Grubi, fleeing investigators, headed to Kosovo and from there, according to public statements by other senior government officials, took refuge in Albania. Grubi’s flight caused a major shock in the country, because in the previous Social Democratic government he was known as the number-two strongman, and that was also his post – First Deputy Prime Minister.

In Croatia, meanwhile, in the middle of last month, Health Minister Vili Beroš, one of the most visible politicians in the country during the coronavirus pandemic, was unexpectedly arrested. Beroš had been “targeted” by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), and the arrest was carried out by Croatia’s Office for the Suppression of Corruption and Organised Crime (USKOK). The European prosecutors pursued him for taking bribes, and the domestic one for trading in influence. Along with the minister, a former head of a Zagreb hospital and a Serbian entrepreneur were arrested; the entrepreneur was suspected of having been favoured in the procurement of certain medical equipment, allegedly backed by a person who has featured in the crime pages for decades. Beroš spent ten days in custody, the prime minister dismissed him as minister, and when he came out of custody he announced he would use the legal option known as “6 + 6”, which allows him to receive six more full and six half salaries – and his salary, given that the government raised ministers’ pay this summer and that Beroš was also deputy prime minister, is no less than 4,700 euros.

In Montenegro, too, since 2022, when the “hunt for big fish” began, dozens of senior state officials have been arrested on suspicion of numerous crimes in the area of corruption and organised crime. Behind the bars of Spuž prison ended up those who for decades held leading positions, who formally dispensed justice and protected the system from crime, but informally were part of the network that captured Montenegro’s institutions, which will not be freed from crime’s claws for a long time. The theses of Montenegro as a “captured state” in which the police, prosecution and judiciary merged with the mafia were confirmed in practice in less than two years. Some of those arrested were considered close friends of former president Milo Đukanović.

Long trials

It has become common in the region for big fish to be arrested, although their trials last particularly long because they hire expensive lawyers skilled at manipulating court proceedings. And some, as in Macedonia, decide to flee abroad, embarrassing the state and exposing the police to ridicule. This year it was Artan Grubi, and six years ago former prime minister Nikola Gruevski also sensationally fled, preferring to let handcuffs be put on his closest associates, ministers Gordana Jankuloska and Mile Janakieski, while choosing for himself a fugitive’s destination – Budapest, where he still enjoys his days as an asylum seeker.

Instead of Gruevski, the public in Macedonia did get a spectacle with the arrest of Chief Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva – a darling of the Colourful Revolution, whom all foreign ambassadors and visiting foreign officials met, and who in the end was caught extorting and taking bribes to spare a wealthy businessman from prosecution. She is still serving her prison sentence.

Blagoja Pandovski, president of Transparency International Macedonia, says that in high-profile cases, i.e. cases of high-level corruption, the influence these people have because of their positions and wealth often prevents justice from being done or a legal conclusion from being reached.

“Instead of the climate in our country opening up and contributing to the fight against corruption – I mean specifically the legislature – moves are being made here that run counter to the anti-corruption agenda,” he says.

The same can be said of Montenegro, which has the example of the President of the Supreme Court. In April 2022, Montenegro arrested Vesna Medenica – “the first lady of the Montenegrin judiciary” – who headed the Supreme Court for three terms and from that position exerted illegal influence on certain court cases. According to Europol data from the Sky app used by criminals to message each other, her son Miloš was involved in cigarette smuggling and drug trafficking.

Medenica spent six and a half months in prison, and several trials and investigations are currently under way against her, in which the prosecution charges her with participating in a criminal organisation while serving as President of the Supreme Court. According to the Special Prosecutor’s Office indictment of October 2022, that criminal organisation was headed by her son Miloš Medenica, who is still in custody.

But such examples are far from changing society’s awareness that abuses should not be committed. Those familiar with the situation stress this too.

“Even though in recent years we witnessed the arrest of the long-serving President of the Supreme Court, who is also a former Chief State Prosecutor, as well as the arrest of two former directors of the Police Directorate, and even though politicians from the previous government were charged with corruption and various crimes, and at the moment we have dozens of police officers in custody, it would be logical to ask whether it is wise for an ordinary citizen to go and report a crime,” says Jelena Jovanović, a long-time crime reporter at the Montenegrin daily Vijesti.

The Balkan region seems to lead Europe in prime ministers and presidents being handcuffed or ending up on international arrest warrants for crime. The charges against former Albanian President Ilir Meta read as if lifted from a Sicilian film. The first charge concerns one of Albania’s biggest financial scandals, involving a state electricity distribution company, a private company and a multi-million-dollar hole in the state budget. According to SPAK, Ilir Meta, then Minister of Economy, Trade and Energy, was bribed to facilitate the deal between the state and private companies, allowing the latter to profit by more than 6.5 million euros at the expense of the state budget.

The second charge claims that Meta received money in exchange for using his influence in favour of a telecommunications company. The third charge concerns a corrupt deal with an Albanian businessman: Meta allegedly undertook to amend a law in the Albanian parliament to suit the businessman’s demands and in return received a private villa.

Ilir Meta is also charged with obtaining consultancy and lobbying contracts in the United States and laundering proceeds of crime to buy a house in Tirana. Similar charges were brought against MP Monika Kryemadhi, his political ally and wife, who is currently divorcing Meta. Both Ilir Meta and Monika Kryemadhi deny the allegations, claiming that the Special Prosecution’s investigation is politically motivated to target the opposition in Albania.

The telecommunications sector is a weak point in the countries of the region, because in Macedonia too, a case of bribing a prime minister and ministers has dragged on for decades and, although backed by evidence from the US, has produced no court outcome at home.

The case, known as “Magyar Telekom”, which “exploded” in 2017, dragged through the court labyrinths for 12 years, but unfortunately without the protagonists of the bribery – former prime minister Vlado Buchkovski, then minister Musa Xhaferi and DUI leader Ali Ahmeti – being convicted. Unlike the participants here, the company’s executives Elek Straub and András Balogh agreed to pay fines of more than a hundred thousand dollars and received a five-year ban from serving in any public company. The third defendant in the case, Tamás Morvai, paid a fine of 60,000 dollars for falsifying the company’s books in connection with the bribery. This is a glaring example of proven bribery that went unpunished in Macedonia, relating to the drafting of a telecommunications law that would prevent competition for the foreign company.

“I think autocratic tendencies and arrogance in governance have strengthened over the past decade,” says Zef Preçi, director of the Albanian Centre for Economic Research, which monitors corruption in government bodies. Commenting on the situation in his country, he stressed that corruption has not decreased. “The perception is that there is success in the fight against corruption. However, indirect measurements and assessments by other organisations, such as OpenData, reveal that corruption has not decreased. Still, the end of impunity has begun, as shown by about 700 cases currently active at the Special Prosecution Office against Organised Crime and Corruption involving senior officials,” Preçi stresses.

Dismissals instead of investigations

The countries of the so-called Western Balkans usually believe that joining the EU is crucial for reducing corruption among senior officials. But Croatia’s experience does not confirm such forecasts. With the arrest and trial of Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, Croatians began a battle against corrupt political elites that they are still fighting today, but although formally European, they still “produce” corruption in Balkan style.

In January, less than a year ago, the Croatian media were shocked by Transparency International’s annual report for 2023, in which Croatia ranked 57th out of 180 countries, with 50 out of a maximum of 100 points. At first glance this looks “not great, not terrible”, but compared with EU members, Croatia is among the worst. What is perhaps most worrying in all this is the normalisation of corruption in public, the fact that corruption is deeply rooted in the political system, and that political officials are a key link in spreading it.

In the eight years of the HDZ government led by Andrej Plenković, more than 30 ministers were dismissed – a significant number precisely because of suspicions of various corrupt schemes. Not long ago, after years of court proceedings, the party itself was convicted of corruption.

If earlier one could get the impression that USKOK launched investigations, filed indictments and made arrests precisely at politically “convenient” moments for the ruling party, that impression became even stronger after controversial judge Ivan Turudić was appointed the new State Attorney in February. The government insisted on his appointment despite criticism that this judge is known for late-night meetings with Croatia’s best-known fugitive from justice, former Dinamo Zagreb boss Zdravko Mamić, and the scandal that broke when the messages leaked that Turudić exchanged via WhatsApp with Josipa Rimac, a former state secretary arrested on suspicion of taking bribes.

Corruption at the highest level in the Balkan countries unfolds like a “reality show”: the public watches a live broadcast in which some actors leave the frame, but others immediately step in. The frame, of course, is high office, which offers countless opportunities for abuse and personal enrichment.

So in Montenegro two former directors of the Police Directorate, Veselin Veljović and Slavko Stojanović, ended up in prison. Veljović, “the most powerful security man” in independent Montenegro, served two terms as director of the Police Directorate, held senior police positions in between, and then became an adviser to former president Milo Đukanović. After a year in prison, Veljović was placed under house arrest; he is suspected of having been a member of the criminal group of fugitive Aleksandar Mrkić, which was charged with cigarette smuggling.

Police Directorate director Slavko Stojanović ended up behind bars for involvement in cigarette smuggling during his term, which fuelled the war between criminal clans and also gave rise to serious allegations of abuse and corruption in the police ranks.

Former senior police official Zoran Lazović and former Chief Special Prosecutor Milivoje Katnić were arrested in mid-April this year on the orders of the Special State Prosecutor’s Office. Lazović is charged with forming a criminal organisation whose members, besides Katnić, include special prosecutor Saša Čađenović and Lazović’s son Petar Lazović, an agent of the National Security Agency (ANB).

“It was painful to watch, especially for me, reading the exchanges from the Sky app or messages from Vesna Medenica’s phone or various files, how these people treated the institutions they ran – including Medenica, Veselin Veljović, Zoran Lazović, Milivoje Katnić. They were small offices of organised crime, staffed by perpetrators and associates of organised criminal groups who did not protect the interests of the state or citizens, but worked for certain interest groups or organised criminal groups,” says Montenegrin journalist Jelena Jovanović.

The impression is that as it advances towards the EU, Montenegro wants to prove to the European family that it no longer compromises with crime. At the end of November, the Special State Prosecutor’s Office filed an indictment against Jelena Perović, former director of the Agency for the Prevention of Corruption. Perović, the prosecution suspects, paid for fictitious overtime, misused official cars and travel, forged visa documents and paid her family’s phone bills. She was under house arrest.

On the orders of Montenegro’s Special Prosecutor’s Office, which has been headed by Vladimir Novović for the past two years, 65 people were arrested in 2023, including 12 Police Directorate officers and one member of the National Security Agency. During 2023, 14 people were prosecuted for high-level corruption on suspicion of committing 13 criminal offences.

Much ado about nothing

But what sets the Balkans apart from Europe when it comes to prosecuting high-level crime and corruption is that many cases end in the style of “much ado about nothing”.

Such is the example of Macedonia, where many big names escaped thanks to amendments to the Criminal Code that reduced penalties for abuse of office and criminal association. This led to the statute of limitations expiring and several former officials who were on trial being released. Among them were the well-known fugitive, former prime minister Nikola Gruevski, and the former head of the secret police and his cousin Sasho Mijalkov, the most powerful figures of the previous VMRO-DPMNE government. They were prosecuted for the illegal purchase of a luxury Mercedes – for which, incidentally, former Interior Minister Gordana Jankuloska served prison time – for the illegal and vindictive demolition of a political rival’s building, for money laundering in the construction of monuments in Skopje, for illegal acquisition of property, and for the mega-case of wiretapping more than 20,000 citizens, opposition figures, journalists and businesspeople. Gruevski fled to Hungary, where he was granted asylum and still lives today, as mentioned above, leaving his closest associates, the Interior Minister and Transport Minister Mile Janakieski, behind bars; today he is known for long Facebook posts in which he presents himself as innocent and a victim of the previous government of the rival SDSM.

“Very few cases involving high-level corruption have ended in court. That was the result of many circumstances, such as the slowness of courts and prosecutors, long durations that cause the statute of limitations to expire, and sometimes weaknesses in the procedure itself that make cases last too long, the use of legal remedies and cases being sent back for retrial, which cannot be prohibited because those rights are provided for in both the Criminal Code and the Constitution,” says Blagoja Pandovski of Transparency International Macedonia.

Confirming Pandovski’s statement is the case of former Macedonian defence minister and later prime minister Vlado Buchkovski, who was charged and tried over the procurement of tank parts and received several prison verdicts, one of them final, but the sentence was never enforced because of the (ab)use of extraordinary legal remedies and other games that allowed the rule of law to be shown, frankly, the middle finger.

The art of escaping the law by obtaining a new office is also a speciality in Albania. More than 10 years ago a video “exploded” there showing Ilir Meta and his associate discussing large sums of money, corruption and influence over the judicial system. The Socialists, led by Edi Rama, used it to call a protest. The demonstrations turned violent, ending with the deaths of four citizens in Tirana.

Yet two years after this tragedy, the Socialist Party ran and won the parliamentary elections in coalition with Meta’s Socialist Movement for Integration, appointing Meta Speaker of Parliament.

In 2017, after the Socialist Party won the elections on its own, Prime Minister Edi Rama offered Meta the post of President of the Republic of Albania. Meta handed over the leadership of his party to his wife Monika Kryemadhi and became president.

Today, when Ilir Meta has finally become a target of investigators, our interviewee Zef Preçi, whose Centre for Economic Research also monitors corruption in Albania, says the ongoing investigations should encourage greater public accountability.

“The fact that several senior political leaders, ministers, former ministers, a former president and many senior local government officials – largely controlled by the current majority – are under investigation, some have been convicted and others are at the end of the investigation, should serve as a way for citizens to better understand the problems of bad governance, the costs of corruption and election-related political corruption. At the same time, it should encourage greater public accountability,” he told us.

In Albania, former prime minister and president Sali Berisha has also been charged with corruption, allegedly with partners in his closest family.

The case concerns the privatisation of land and buildings in Tirana by five owner families. The land was later developed into residential complexes. According to the Special Prosecution, Berisha, as prime minister, favoured his son-in-law Jamarber Malltezi and investor Fatmir Bektashi by adopting laws and regulations tailored to the needs of the five land-owning families. The prosecution completed its investigation in October 2024, and the case awaits trial at the Court against Corruption and Organised Crime.

Among the smaller “fish” in Albania, if they can be called that at all, the law has targeted the protagonists of the scandal over the three incinerators in Tirana, Fier and Elbasan, also known as “the scandal of the decade”. As part of this investigation, an arrest warrant was issued for Deputy Prime Minister and Economy Minister Arben Ahmetaj on charges of corruption, money laundering and concealment of assets. However, Ahmetaj fled just days before the prosecution’s request and remains at large in Switzerland, where he was granted asylum. In connection with this scandal, former Environment Minister Lefter Koka was sentenced to 10 years in prison for corruption, money laundering and abuse of office by the Court against Corruption and Organised Crime. The Mayor of Tirana, Erion Veliaj, is also under investigation for his role in signing the contract for the Tirana incinerator.

Is there pressure or not?

A constant topic in the Western Balkan countries, and more widely in the region, is the collusion between politics and the judiciary, which leads to distrust of prosecutors and judges. But although the evidence is in front of everyone’s eyes, legal proof is difficult, and so people watch with disappointment as criminal affairs fail to reach a conclusion.

In Macedonia, the country where, with political approval for amendments to the Criminal Code, numerous perpetrators of crimes who held high office remained free, a special department has now been set up in the State Public Prosecutor’s Office where prosecutors can report pressure. But, surprisingly, there have been no such reports.

“So far no formal reports have been submitted to the department, but there is certain information about attempts at indirect influence which, we stress, do not come from political structures. All this information is taken extremely seriously and will be checked so that it can be addressed in a timely and appropriate manner. Public prosecutors act against all perpetrators of crimes and, whenever there is sufficient evidence to substantiate suspicions, bring them before justice regardless of their position in social and political structures,” the Prosecutor’s Office told us.

Does anyone believe that? Well, that’s a completely different question.

This overview of the cases we have singled out is just a drop in the ocean of high-level corruption and crime in the region. The fact that the list includes officials from the very top of the pyramid shows that either they are not afraid of the law, or that investigative bodies are servile to politics and the power that comes from it.

This content was produced by the Institute of Communication Studies.

Journalists: Sonja Kramarska, Aleksandra Mudreša (Montenegro), Jona Plumbi (Albania), Ivor Fuka (Croatia)

Camera: Nake Batev, Sladjan Fatikj

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This article was translated from Macedonian using artificial intelligence (AI). The original Macedonian version is available here.