In December 2019, an Albanian citizen residing in Antwerp, Belgium, was boasting about his long list of properties in Albania while under environmental surveillance by Belgian authorities for involvement in the drug trade.
During a careless conversation with another Albanian, he also revealed his money-laundering scheme, run in cooperation with a local fuel dealer from his hometown.
“I have, in Fier, I think 17, 17 entries; in Durrës around 15, in Tirana some 7, I have about 3 shops,” Besjan Ramaj is quoted as saying in the court file. “I had some olive groves in Belishovë; Ardjan supposedly bought them off me,” he said.
Besjan Ramaj, 56, had been involved for at least a decade in the criminal narcotics trade and already carried a 2012 criminal conviction from the Norwegian justice system at the time he was being wiretapped by the Belgian authorities.
But his prior criminal record in Europe did not stop him from investing more than 1 million euros in real estate in Albania, using businessman Ardjan Malasi and his company “Ledio – 04” as a front.
Unlike Ramaj, Malasi had a clean criminal record and was feeding his ostensibly legitimate business with cash whose origin lay in the drug trade. According to investigations initially carried out by the Belgians, Malasi’s business also served as cover for transfers of tens of thousands of euros from Albania to Belgium through banking channels.
In investigated money-laundering schemes, this is not an isolated case.
According to the Special Prosecution Office (SPAK), members of organised crime are increasingly making sure to recruit people without prior convictions and with business connections to handle their money-circulation and laundering operations.
“The persons involved in money laundering are not necessarily linked to drug trafficking,” said Dorina Bejko, prosecutor at SPAK.
“Most of them are people with a clean profile, in order to give the impression that the activity is legitimate and that everything complies with the law,” she added.
The money-laundering fronts
Albania is the main destination for the proceeds of Albanian organised-crime networks and one of the countries in Europe with the highest money-laundering risk. During 2025 alone, the Special Prosecution Office stated that it had seized and confiscated criminal assets worth 45.4 million euros — of which more than 98 percent are suspected of originating from the international narcotics trade.
Money-laundering schemes have grown more sophisticated over the years, using a variety of channels to transfer and disguise funds through informal systems, the use of cryptocurrencies and intensive cash circulation.
According to an analysis by the Special Prosecution Office, Albanian organised crime also uses formally lawful commercial entities as cover for circulating and recycling funds. The final phase of laundering involves investments in real estate, businesses with high cash turnover and commercial activities with weak internal controls.
According to prosecutor Dorina Bejko, Albanian criminal groups are constantly looking for trusted third parties to use as fronts in their money-laundering operations; these may be business partners, founders of shell companies, or personal associates.
“In the case of family members, the trust is understandable, since because of the relationship the risk of betrayal is lower. But with other third parties, [trust] can be created through notarial documents, the financial dependence that those third parties may have on the person involved in narcotics trafficking, or even through pressure,” Bejko explained.
Based on the files investigated by the Special Prosecution Office, these third parties are most often entrepreneurs in the construction sector, managers of bars or restaurants, fuel traders or real-estate agents.
“These are precisely the sectors where cash circulation is most sensitive, which makes it easier and more feasible to launder money — to mix money generated by unlawful activities with money that may be generated by the activity of these commercial companies,” Bejko added.
The flow of criminal money no longer follows a single direction; it is also transferred from Albania toward European Union states or to Latin America, where Albanian organised-crime groups operate. For this reason, international cooperation is indispensable for tracing and investigating these cases.
“Drug trafficking as a criminal offence has transnational elements. In this way, the laundering of money and the income obtained from this process can also be invested in foreign countries, making the criminal scheme even more complex,” Bejko told BIRN.
The laundering scheme
The city of Antwerp in northern Belgium is considered one of the main gateways for cocaine into Europe, alongside the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. According to a Europol assessment, around 70% of cocaine entered the European market through these two ports during 2024.
Antwerp is also an early operational base for Albanian criminal groups, according to data obtained from messages exchanged through the Sky ECC application.
According to court documents obtained by BIRN, Belgian police picked up Besjan Ramaj’s trail in September 2017, after an investigation into the sale of a quantity of cocaine. A second piece of intelligence in 2019 linked him to a cannabis plantation in a building in Ternat, a rural municipality not far from Brussels.
After his arrest in 2020, Ramaj was sentenced in October 2021 to eight years in prison and an 80,000-euro fine for the unlawful cultivation of cannabis and the export and transport of 1,550 kilograms of cocaine. As part of the group, his brother Leonard Ramaj was also found guilty and sentenced to 2 years in prison and an 8,000-euro fine.
According to information transmitted by letters rogatory from the Belgian authorities, Ramaj was accused of having organised, in cooperation with others, fictitious sales of his properties in Albania in order to obtain “clean money,” transferred through bank accounts to be invested in the purchase of real estate in Belgium.
The investigation has documented how an olive grove in Belishovë in Mallakastër was fictitiously sold to Malasi for 102,000 euros — money that was transferred via bank to Belgium and that served as the main source for the purchase of an apartment worth 198,000 euros.
During the search of his home in Belgium following the arrest, documents were also seized as evidence relating to the apartments in Fier and to other transactions carried out by Malasi.
Based on the data secured from its Belgian counterparts, the Special Prosecution Office in 2023 opened criminal proceedings for money laundering against the Ramaj brothers and two of their associates, Ardjan Malasi and Rajmonda Dashi — a former director at the Cadastre who had a personal relationship with Ramaj. The Special Prosecution Office also seized 19 apartments and garages in the cities of Fier and Tirana with an estimated value of 1.2 million euros, mainly purchased by Malasi, his company “Ledio-04” and Leonard Ramaj.
In October 2025, the Special Court found all four guilty of “laundering the proceeds of crime” as part of an investigation grounded in the “Antimafia” law, while it dismissed the structured criminal-group charges. The four defendants denied the charges and any cooperation with one another.
According to the court’s decision, Ramaj had built a scheme characterised by the use of cash, its integration into commercial entities, loan transactions and transfers between company accounts and personal accounts.
“Citizen Ardjan Malasi has continually injected cash into his commercial company and then used it to buy real estate for the defendant Besjan Ramaj. They have also engaged in fictitious sale-purchase transactions, enabling money to enter banking circulation, after which it was transferred to the personal accounts of the defendant Besjan Ramaj,” the court’s decision states.
“The issuing of fictitious invoices was also carried out through commercial companies set up in Belgium by the two brothers and through the company of citizen Ardjan Malasi. The amount of money involved in the criminal activity of laundering the proceeds of crime is found to be approximately one million two hundred and fifty thousand euros and nine million lek,” the court’s decision concludes.
