Official documents leaked from the Ministry of Defense show that the maintenance of the marine radar systems is a history full of suspicious tenders and financial abuse.
It all starts in 2011 when the “Idea Tel” company enters the scene with Idlir Karkini as administrator.
In August 2011, the Marine Force Command gave the radar maintenance contract to “Idea Tel”, through a secret tender. The contract was for four months, until the end of the year, for 487,000 USD.
Before this, until 2010, the system had been maintained by Lockheed Martin for 330,000 USD a year, which also was the company that built it.
The contract with “Idea Tel” was found as a violation by an audit of the Defense Ministry.
Besides financial violations, further inspections showed that the radars were not being maintained properly, and some of them were out of order.
After these findings, the Ministry of Defense removed the company’s contract, but in August 2013 they were back.
When the elections were over and the Democratic Party government was spending its last weeks in power, their Defense Ministry held another tender, this time with 560,000 USD. The winner was the “AR and TI” company.
Two weeks after coming to power, the former Socialist Defense Minister, Mimi Kodheli, cancelled the tender but increased the annual fund from 560,000 to 850,000 USD.
The tender was held secretly, with the Defense Ministry inviting only the companies picked by them. Lockheed Martin was excluded from the bid, and the tender was won once again by “Idea Tel”, in cooperation with the Italian “Gem Electronica”.
The Ministry of Defense didn’t give details about this contract because it was classified as secret. But Minister Olta Xhacka said for Top Channel that their agreement was with the Italian company “Gem Electronica”, although the audit showed that all documents had the name of Idea Tel as a partner in this tender.
The case of radars was made public in 2015 when an audit of the Supreme State Audit found that the procedure was illegal. The Ministry of Defense, according to the audit, should have made an open tender and bring the Lockheed Martin to join the race. Being the company that had built the first system, they had also maintained it for 220,000 USD a year.
But the increased cost has not been the only abuse for the tender. Later, a report of the Electronic and Postal Communication Authority found that large part of the radars installed by Idea Tel was operating as unauthorized frequencies. An audit of the Defense Ministry found that the operation of these radars was problematic.
Top Channel
