At the edge of Tirana, beyond the “Pallati me shigjeta” (Arrows Building), the pollution of the Lana River assaults the eyes and pierces the nose. A sewage collector freely discharges into the river the excrement that the current pushes westward — first into the Ishëm river and then into the Adriatic Sea.
The quality of life of residents living near this stretch of the Lana resembles the Middle Ages.
“There is no more polluted river in Europe than the Lana,” says environmental activist and Tirana Faculty of Natural Sciences professor Aleko Miho with concern. “It is so bad that when we measure bacterial loads, the pollution level registers above the maximum the instruments accept.”
The pollution of the Lana is not new, since back in the 1960s during communist Albania the capital’s sewerage network was built in such a way that it discharges directly into the river.
But three decades after the fall of communism, Tirana remains the only capital in Europe that does no treatment whatsoever of its wastewater network — endangering the environment and the health of its residents.
This historic failure, however, comes with a steep financial bill.
Since 2008, Albanian governments have spent tens of millions of euros on consulting services, construction tenders and arbitration costs for the project of a Lana wastewater treatment plant whose contract was unlawfully terminated by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Energy in 2018.
The project still feeds today the only hope for a partial solution to Tirana’s wastewater problem, even though it has been languishing unfinished and at risk of deterioration in the Kashar area for years.
The National Water Supply and Sewerage Agency, AKUK, told BIRN that it is working to finalise the project, which is currently undergoing a fresh assessment of its condition.
“Currently the consultancy service is conducting a detailed engineering analysis to assess the current state of the project as well as a review of the detailed design in line with the current needs of the service area, which will serve as the base documentation for restarting and finalising the project,” AKUK said.
The Japan International Cooperation Agency, JICA, which financed the project through a soft loan in 2008, also said that “the loan is still valid and the project is ongoing”.
But for environmental experts, the unjustified termination of the project has brought severe and long-term consequences for the capital.
“The over-7-year delay of the project has deprived citizens of a basic service that should have been functioning long ago, creating social, economic and environmental damage,” said Aleksandër Trajçe, director of the environmental organisation PPNEA.
‘A national emergency’
Tirana has undergone frenetic growth over the past three decades, in surface area and population. Once surrounded by hills, the city has been transformed into a laboratory for foreign architects in recent years — with high concrete towers and shimmering facades competing with one another.
Prime Minister Edi Rama boasts of Tirana’s transformation, which according to him “produces more architecture than the rest of Europe”. Yet in contrast to the vertical development, Tirana continues to inherit a poorly funded sewerage network built during the 1930s–1970s.
The Lana river flows from Mount Dajt with clean water and turns into an open-sky sewer collector as soon as it touches the urban periphery of Tirana.
According to a 2025 audit report by the Supreme State Audit (KLSH), 85 wastewater collectors and an unknown number of septic pits in the capital’s informal areas discharge into the Lana — from Shkoza all the way to where it joins the Tirana river.
The lack of investment and the blocking of the contract for the construction of the Kashar plant has, according to KLSH, left the wastewater treatment situation in Tirana in a critical state — even in stark contrast to the average for the rest of the country.
“The lack of an active treatment plant in Tirana constitutes an environmental and health risk, breaching European standards for cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants, which require 85% coverage,” the report states. According to KLSH, the construction and commissioning of the Kashar plant is “a national emergency”.
For environmental expert Aleksandër Trajçe, the Tirana of 2026 is not very different from medieval cities. Unlike local residents accustomed to the dirty water and heavy stench, Trajçe says foreign tourists are alarmed when they learn that the Lana plays the role of an open sewage canal.
“The sewerage and wastewater treatment system is one of the most fundamental services for public health and urban development. Without it, you cannot speak of a modern city or quality of life,” Trajçe told BIRN.
For citizens, the pollution translates into an unhealthy urban environment, a public-health risk and a lower quality of life.
“Sewage water is a direct source of many diseases, especially if it contaminates water sources and comes into physical contact with people,” he added.
Professor Aleko Miho is on the same line, while emphasising that in this situation no one can be safe. Beyond the sewage, he says, untreated stormwater is also a problem because of the high content of chemicals and detergents which, over the long term, penetrate the composition of the soil.
“The soil starts to bear cancer. Cancer that lodges in the plants that feed the livestock, in the meat, in the milk,” he says with concern. “Setting politics aside, left or right, urgent intervention is needed,” Miho stressed.
The contract termination, unlawful
The Tirana wastewater treatment plant project was financed through a soft loan in 2008, procured in 2014 and blocked in 2018. Built at the foot of the Kashar hills, the plant aimed to cover a population of 350,000 inhabitants — with a planned second phase to fully resolve the wastewater treatment problem.
The winner of the works contract tender was a consortium of the Italian company “Construzioni Dondi” and the Japanese “Kubota Corporation”, with a contract value of around 81 million euros. But in 2018, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Energy decided to terminate the contract unilaterally, sending the dispute to the Court of International Arbitration in London. At the time of the contract termination, works had been completed at 70%, or to the value of 56 million euros.
The problems with the construction of the Kashar plant began after the 2017 elections, which marked the split between the Socialist Party and its ally, the Socialist Movement for Integration (LSI). The project’s leadership, members of the LSI, were dismissed from duty.
Albens Alite, project coordinator until 2017 and a former senior administrator from the LSI ranks, says everything went wrong with the arrival of the new staff.
“The new project director did not know a single word of English — the language we used to communicate with the Japanese, but also the language of the endless documents that reflected the substance of the contract. As a result, the volume of works for 2018 dropped to its lowest level, only 5 per cent execution,” Alite told BIRN.
The project also faced unforeseen problems such as the depreciation of the yen and a landslide near the Kashar plant.
In early 2018, the then Minister of Infrastructure, Damian Gjiknuri, initiated an audit of the wastewater treatment plant project and in March he filed a criminal complaint with the prosecutor’s office for “abuse of duty” against the former project leadership, including Alite, charging them with damage of 21 million euros.
But the case was dismissed in October 2018, after the Tirana Court found no elements of the criminal offence of abuse of duty against any of the officials of the General Directorate of Water Supply and Sewerage.
“Every action of the DPUK officials was authorised and approved by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (Japan Bank for Development) as the authority foreseen in the agreement for supervising and approving tendering procedures and money transfers,” the Court’s decision states.
“No actions were taken in violation of the laws and bylaws by the persons charged that would form the elements of the criminal offence of ‘abuse of duty’,” the decision further emphasises.
The Ministry of Infrastructure and Energy’s decision led to the complete blockage of the project. The “Dondi & Kubota” consortium was notified on 4 July 2018 of the contract termination through a letter from the then head of the General Directorate of Water Supply and Sewerage, Arben Skënderi. Skënderi did not respond to a request for comment from BIRN.
Alite contends that the unilateral termination of the contract and all the procedures that accompanied this action were carried out incorrectly.
“It could have been irresponsibility, laziness, or ignorance. It may even have been the idiocy of partisan revenge, but in no case did the contract termination have any connection to logic,” Alite said.
The arbitration bill
The International Court of Arbitration in London considered the decision to terminate the contract by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Energy and the National Water Supply and Sewerage Agency to be unlawful.
Through a decision announced on 14 March 2024, the Albanian state was penalised with 13.5 million euros in damages in favour of the claimant consortium, not counting representation and maintenance costs, which deepen the financial damage.
The State Advocacy Office gave no details on the reasoning of the decision, considering the arbitration process confidential between the parties, in a response to BIRN.
Nevertheless, the KLSH audit reveals that, according to the decision, the contract termination had been carried out unilaterally by the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Water Supply and Sewerage Agency “in breach of the financing agreement and the conditions of the contract concluded with the contractor”. According to the decision, the MIE and AKUM also did not obtain prior approval from the financier — the Japan Bank for Development, JICA — for the contract termination.
The arbitration decision also assesses that the principal cause of the delays and non-execution of the project was the contractor’s inability to access and possess the construction site, as well as marked delays in carrying out payments and reimbursing VAT.
“The inability to access and possess the site for the construction of the manholes and microtunnelling works negatively affected every aspect of what the Respondent claims were the Claimant’s failures. In the Tribunal’s opinion, this was the essential and principal cause of the delays and of the non-completion of the Project,” the arbitration decision is cited as saying in the KLSH report.
In addition to the 13.5-million-euro penalty, the report emphasises that the State Advocacy Office spent around 1.8 million euros as representation and expertise costs to represent Albania in the case before the Court of Arbitration in London.
On the other side, AKUK has spent more than 66 million lek on additional site-maintenance contracts, without resolving the deterioration problems such as the loss of cast-iron pipe levels, damage to chlorination units from the 2019 earthquake, or the lack of protective measures for the digesters from possible landslides.
“The maintenance contract does not guarantee the upkeep of the essential works of the Greater Tirana sewerage system, especially of reinforced-concrete structures such as shaft tanks, or of mechanical systems,” the KLSH audit report states.
Despite the financial burden falling on the state, the former Minister of Infrastructure, Damian Gjiknuri, calls the arbitration decision a victory.
“The decision [to break the contract] was motivated by the failure to implement the contract. This means that the breaking of the contract is not a violation, but the implementation of the contract,” Gjiknuri said in a phone communication with BIRN.
“In the decision of the Court of Arbitration, it recognised them only for the latest works they had carried out, which had not been paid for. It was the best possible result. …if so, the state has won and has not lost,” he added.
For the head of PPNEA, the losers are the state and its citizens.
Trajçe estimates that some damage may be recoverable if the plant is put into operation as soon as possible, but some environmental consequences will require years, even decades, to recover.
“So the more the plant is delayed, the more difficult recovery will also be,” he concluded.
