Why Rama, after every scandal, prefers an even bigger one

Alfred Lela

When Edi Rama once unabashedly declared that he stayed up until four in the morning watching Gangs of London, many may have regarded it as nothing more than the Prime Minister indulging in a little criminal fiction after a long day at work.

Edi Rama was only getting started then, and his pirouettes could still take in those who did not know him well.

As countless case files, wiretaps and episodes of prime-ministerial dealings would later demonstrate, when Rama publicly proclaimed his fondness for Narcos, Escobar or Gangs of London, he was revealing an inner inclination—not a pastime, not merely a preference for a genre of television or cinema.

Through his tastes, Rama was unveiling his alter ego: the narcissist’s other face.

The latest case—that of Ron Yeffet, who, according to the Israeli himself, was tasked with doing Rama’s dirty work—shows that after every scandal in which this dark side emerges, the head of government does not retreat; he only returns later to his inner inclination. Instead, he descends even deeper into its abyss.

Any normal mind would have assumed that, after the “Agasi scandal”—with its videos, wiretaps, seizures, wine cellars and full repertoire of violence and blackmail—Rama would make a tactical turn. Wrong!

He replaced a domestic coordinator of crime with a foreign one.

That foreigner appears to be Ron Yeffet, the Israeli who featured in the recordings made public by Arben Ahmetaj on Syri TV’s Çim Peka Live. He represents the globalization of Rama’s psychopathological attraction to noir: the dark, the forbidden, the criminal.

The scheme is clear and, as in the cases of the Camorra, Cosa Nostra, and other international criminal clans, it involves companies concealed within other companies in order to cover up illegal activities, creating protective legal and financial shells. What distinguishes the Yeffet case is that the parent shell is the Albanian state, led by Edi Rama. In other words, “Kayo”—the company bearing the Socialist Party’s carnation—acts as a shield for the unlawful operations of other companies registered under the jurisdiction, insignia, and protection of the Republic of Albania.

What makes this case distinctive and sophisticated is not the crime- theft or manipulation in itself- but Rama’s attempt to construct a global protective shell around himself—one that he can use as an instrument for lobbying, concealing wealth, and securing protection through connections and money, both if his power and personal security are threatened and if, after falling from power, he seeks to return to it tomorrow.

Through “Kayo” and Yeffet’s companies and activities, Rama is not simply treating his Israeli friend generously. He is weaving ties with an international underworld of interests and occult connections for entirely personal ends.

In this transaction, Albania—its resources, finances and interests—has been offered up as collateral.

This scheme is more insidious than the others because it seeks to make Rama part of a global network, a cabal of underground exchanges whose profits are extracted from state resources and actors and channelled into private reserves and private hands.

This is Rama’s virtual bitcoin in the international real-estate market, where the most immovable asset is the network itself and the interests tied to it. Rama has put Albania up for auction—and nothing has grasped this more intuitively than the collective intelligence of the protest movement, which declared from the outset: “Albania is not for sale!”

There is only one way to stop it.