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Madness to the core! How the execution of the €190 thousand fine of Bankers Petroleum was sabotaged
2026-01-30 22:23:45 / AKTUALITET
In 2020, one of businessman Besnik Sulaj's companies, which used ARMO, filed a complaint with the Competition Authority against Bankers Petroleum. Businessman Sulaj complained that Bankers, from its monopoly position, was discriminating against his company by not selling oil to it, while selling it to the Cerrik and Fier Refineries.
The review of the case took a long time. Initially, the Competition Authority issued a decision that obliged Bankers to apply equal trading conditions to the companies with which it entered into contractual relations. But Bankers did not implement the decision.
In 2021, the Competition Commission again decided to force Bankers to implement the previous decision, even warning the company that failure to implement Competition decisions is punishable by a fine of up to 10 percent of the previous year's turnover. But Bankers again failed to implement the non-discrimination decision.
After many clashes and interim decisions, in October 2022, the Competition Commission officially found in its decision that Bankers had not implemented the decisions and was in compliance with Article 74 of the Law on the Protection of Competition, which sanctioned the punishment of the company with a fine of up to 10 percent of turnover. In the case of Bankers Petroleum, 10 percent of turnover meant a fine of 30 million euros.
But the strings behind the scenes are moving and in the end the Competition Commission decided to punish Bankers with the minimum fine of 19.8 million lekë or 200 thousand euros, something like 0.05 percent of turnover. In short, a hair.
However, the misery never ends. Even this money was not spent.
After imposing the fine, the Court issued the relevant enforcement order. With the order in hand, the Competition Authority contracted an enforcement agency to enforce it and collect 200 thousand euros from Bankers. But as soon as the enforcement agent began carrying out the enforcement actions, things started moving again behind the scenes.
Strangely, the Competition Authority took the case file away from the bailiff who had begun the process of enforcing the fine and transferred it to another enforcement agency called Private Enforcement Group. And this move was apparently not so random. The fine money was never collected.
In fact, collecting money from Bankers Petroleum was difficult because the Chinese company did not have any active accounts in Albania, except for an overdraft at Raiffeisen Bank, which could not be executed. This was all a criminal scheme. But let's get back to the state's money.
The same enforcement office, which had the Competition Authority's fine file, also had an enforcement file for a 600 thousand euro debt to Bankers on behalf of a private entity. The enforcement officer found a way to enforce the private entity's money. While he left the state's money to the streets.
As a result, 4 years after imposing the minimum fine of 200 thousand euros, the state has still not received the money. Not even 200 thousand euros. As much as the Deputy General Director of Bankers Petroleum, a Chinese gambler named Zhang Fuguo, leaves in a single day in the casinos of Tirana or Vlora.
This is simply the story of a deep-rooted corruption, where a company that collected over 300 million euros a year from the exploitation of Albanians' wealth, did not even pay 200 thousand euros to the state. Of course, with the help of public officials, who reached as far as the Prime Minister's anteroom. / Kapitali.al
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