A poor fight by institutions to seize illegal property

According to the National Co-ordinator for Combating Economic Crime, Albanian Fazliu, only one reported property seizure case has been recorded for the past year, which is worth 23 thousand euros.

There is one case, a single case reported so far in the amount of only 23 thousand euros for an entire judicial system where we have hundreds of policemen, prosecutors and hundreds of judges. I consider it a negligible figure”, Fazliu stressed.

The poor results in confiscating property acquired through criminal work, according to the National Co-ordinator for Combating Economic Crime, Albanian Fazliu are not exclusively the result of the lack of legal infrastructure.

There's more than 24m euros of frozen or sequencing wealth, but I said there's a little difference in the past few years, because the trend in confiscated wealth has dropped, and this year the seizure numbers are almost in negligible numbers. So we barely have a case of seizures. I'm always talking about the ninth-month-old of 2018, so we still don't have the last quarter figures of 2018<18x1>, Fazliu told Radio Free Europe.

According to Fazliu, in the past five years there is a fortune of 156 million euros that is frozen or sequentized.

Meanwhile, in terms of seizure figures, he underlines, they barely exceed the total figure of 3.5m euros confiscated in the last five years. This, according to him, speaks of an extremely large disproportion between secuested and confiscated wealth.

Meanwhile, the head of the Commission for Legislation in the Kosovo Assembly, Albulen Haxhiu, says that in addition to the lack of political will, the legislation in force is incompatible with the high level of organised crime and corruption.

You can read the complete article on Radio Free Europe.