After being absent for more than one year, due to the missing quorum to
hold the meetings, the Audiovisual Media Authority decided today to not
give the national broadcasting licenses to Top Channel, TV Klan,
Digitalb and Supersport.
AMA says that in the meeting held with the presence of Gentian Salaj, Chairman of the Authority; Vice Chairman, Sami Neza, and members Gledis Gjipali, Piro Misha, Suela Musta and Zylyftar Bregu, they decided to not give the national licenses based on the Beauty Contest procedure, since they failed to reach the legal quorum for the licenses.
The official AMA announcement explains that Vice Chairman Sami Neza and member Suela Musta decided to reject the applications of Top Channel, TV Klan, Digitalb and Supersport, based on article 139.8 of law 97/2013 which says that the Beauty Contest procedure is done for a transition procedure, and the final deadline for passing all broadcasts to digital was 17 June 2015.
For this reason, Neza and Musta requested for the illegal procedure to be cancelled and allow an open race for licensing the operators based on article 70 of the law “Application for digital licenses” and article 71 for “reviewing the applications for the digital network license”.
According to them, AMA should implement the dispositions of law 97/2013 for what has been expressed in article 62, since operators of Digitalb and TV Klan don’t respect the law related to the ownership.
The two votes against come from the two members who for more than one year have not been part of the meetings at this authority, burning this way the deadlines provided by article 136 of the law for the media, quoted above.
It is clear that politics keeps withholding this as any other area of life in Albania. Same as in 2005-2008, when Top Channel’s license was blocked systematically, even today in 2016, the same vote of a divided politics is blocking a national and international reality such as Top Channel and Digitalb.
The decision comes on the same day when the Democratic Party, through the Media Commission member, Luciano Boci, has defended the former AMA leader, Endira Bushati, who has been criminally charged over power abuse.
Top Channel
