#behgjet pacolli

[mariacallous]

Between 2017 and 2020, Albania Prime Minister Edi Rama, his advisors and the former minister of Infrastructure, Damian Gjiknuri, spent some $6,000 US while staying at the Trump International hotel in Washington DC, owned by then US President Donald Trump.

The details of these expenditures are part of a 156-page report called “White House for sale, How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers Paid Off President Trump” that was produced by Democrats on the House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee.

The report says such payments were attempts to influence the then US President.

Using documents obtained following a legal battle by Mazars company, the report details expenses of foreign officials on various Trump-owned businesses, totaling $8.7 million.

“By elevating his personal financial interests and the policy priorities of corrupt foreign powers over the American public interest, former President Trump violated both the clear commands of the Constitution and the careful precedent set and observed by every previous Commander-in-Chief,” Congressman Jamie Raskin, the main Democrat member of the Committee, wrote in the foreword of the report.

According to the report, in January and March 2018, Rama’s advisors, Dorjan Duçka, Endri Fuga and Keisi Seferi, spent over $1,000 each in the Trump International Hotel. Rama himself spent $1,158 during a visit in March 2018. His former minister of Infrastructure Damian Gjiknuri spent $1,025 in June 2018 for a one-night stay.

Along with Albanian officials, Kosovo’s former deputy premier Behgjet Pacolli and other officials from Kosovo spent over $4,950 in the same hotel, the report shows.

At the time of President Trump’s election, the Albanian opposition Democratic Party, and its leader, Lulzim Basha, (whose Trump-like slogan was “Make Albania Great Again”) accused PM Rama’s ruling Socialist Party of endemic corruption and ties to organised crime.

Following the 2017 elections in Albania, the opposition organised protests and boycotted the parliament, claiming the government had won the elections by collusion with organised crime and vote buying.

As the parties in Albania fought each other, their clashes were transferred across the ocean, as both parties attempted to influence the Trump administration through lobbying campaigns.

Rama’s Socialists hired Brian Ballard, a Trump campaigner in Washington DC, for $20,000 a month. Rama’s rival, Basha, engaged Nicholas Muzin, former aide to US conservative Senator Ted Cruz and an advisor to the Trump campaign.

Through Muzin, Basha secured a photo opportunity with Trump and used it widely in his electoral campaign back home, albeit without success.

The report says Rama’s stay in the Trump International Hotel was connected with his meeting with the now disgraced former FBI counterespionage agent Charles McGonigal, who was sentenced in December 2023 to four years in jail for providing services to sanctioned Russian oligarch and Putin agent Oleg Deripaska.

“Federal prosecutors have alleged that on March 4, Mr Rama dined with Charles McGonigal, a former FBI counterintelligence chief, and Agron Neza, a New Jersey businessman who previously worked at an Albanian intelligence agency,” the report notes.

Rama chose to stay in the Trump hotel during his visit in March 2018. For the two-night stay, Rama and his advisors spent $3,474. They stayed on the same floor as Neza. Dorjan Duçka, another of Rama’s advisors, booked four rooms for the two nights on January 18 and 19 2018, for some $1,503.

US Congressmen found out also that Albania Former Minister of Energy Damian Gjiknuri chose the same hotel for his stay in DC on June 24 to 26 2018, paying some $1,025.66.

Albania parties spent huge sums on bids to influence US politics, often raising questions about the source of the money.

[kritere]

La vita privata di Anna Oxa: i tre ex mariti, l’amore con Gianni Belleno e i figli Francesca e Qazim

DIRETTA TV Festival di Sanremo 7 Febbraio 2023 Anna Oxa è stata sposata prima con il compositore Franco Ciani, poi con l’imprenditore di origini albanesi Behgjet Pacolli e infine con la sua ex guardia del corpo Marco Sansonetti. Nel mezzo una lunga relazione con il musicista dei New Trolls Gianni Belleno, dal quale ha avuto i figli Francesca e Qazim. 0 CONDIVISIONI Attiva le notifiche per…

[meddyhud]

Bashkë për Zhvillim - Meeting of two countries: Kosovo and Albania

Event by VM3

Photo (c)Meddy Huduti

[xhemilbeharaj]

Divjaka/ Rama skarcon projektin e Behgjet Pacollit

Divjaka/ Rama skarcon projektin e Behgjet Pacollit

Komiteti i Investimeve Strategjike, ka vendosur në prill të këtij viti të refuzojë kërkesën e kompanisë Mabetex të ish-ministrit të jashtëm Behgjet Pacolli për një koncesion të parkut kombëtar Divjakë-Karavasta me synimin e ndërtimit të pallateve shumëkatëshe dhe vilave në brendësi të parkut. Vendimi, i cili u mor në bazë të një ligji kontrovers të quajtur “Ligji i Investimeve Strategjike” i…

[radiotelevizionishqiptar]

Pacolli prish marrëveshjen me Lidhjen Demokratike të Kosovës

Lexo të plotë www.rtsh.al

[newstfionline]

Not the Worst Hotel in the World, Perhaps, but ‘the World Is Very Big’

By Andrew Higgins, NY Times, March 1, 2018

PRISTINA, Kosovo--The Grand Hotel in the Kosovar capital of Pristina is regularly reviled in internet reviews. Here’s a sample: “disgusting,” “a ruin” and “an absolute horror. Probably the worst I have ever been at.”

But the managers seem unfazed by the online abuse. They do not take web bookings and barely offer access to the internet; their hotel has no email account.

A byword for modern opulence when this part of the Balkans was still part of the now defunct Yugoslavia, the state-owned Grand has gone into such a steep decline that even Kosovo’s president, Hashim Thaci, usually an eager booster of everything his country has to offer, struggles to find anything nice to say about it.

“I don’t think it is the worst hotel in the world, but that is because the world is very big,” the president said, expressing disbelief when told that I was staying there.

When I checked into the 500-room property recently, I was the only guest. With 13 stories and three adjoining concrete blocks in a prime location, the hotel accommodates flocks of pigeons on the upper floors and has rented out its basement, once used as a prison by Serbian paramilitary thugs, to a health club.

But it is otherwise deserted, a maze of dimly lit corridors that are littered with pigeon feathers, strung with cobwebs, lined with doors of dark wood and haunted by even darker memories of Kosovo’s past. Two floors have been reduced to rubble, the remnants of a remodeling program that ran out of money.

The establishment’s color scheme--lots of mossy green--and dilapidated creepiness would make it an excellent set for a remake of the Coen brothers’ 1991 film “Barton Fink,” which features a similarly deserted hotel in Hollywood.

The Grand’s general manager, Rrahim Fazliu, conceded that the place perhaps no longer deserved the five-star rating it has claimed since it was built in 1978. But, he insisted, “with a bit of makeup” it can become a “symbol of success” for a country still struggling to find its stride nearly 20 years after a NATO bombing campaign broke Serbia’s grip on the unruly region.

The hotel, Mr. Fazliu added, was a “mirror of Kosovo,” and the image reflected there these days is decidedly less alluring than what had been hoped for when it achieved freedom in 1999.

Service is minimal to nonexistent, the marble lobby stinks of cigarette smoke and the green carpeting that covers most of the floors is stained and scarred. And then there are the cockroaches.

But to be fair, the Grand deserves better reviews than it gets online. On the two floors kept ready for guests, rooms are kept relatively clean and offer occasional hot water. The few staff that remain try to be helpful, and they are clearly embarrassed by the shabby state of their once respectable establishment.

Shurije Abazi, a 58-year-old maid who started working at the hotel a month after it opened four decades ago, still makes sure there are soap and shampoo for guests who no longer exist but who, in a triumph of hope over reality, she thinks will soon return.

Along with other ethnic Albanian staff she lost her job in the 1990s, when Serbia’s former dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, began a program of ethnic cleansing. She has no nostalgia for those times but still mourns the hotel’s decay.

The president, who has only bad memories of the hotel in the past and despairs at its current condition, harbors big plans for its future.

“Perhaps we could build a Trump Tower there,” Mr. Thaci suggested.

Before Yugoslavia collapsed in a spasm of bloodletting in the 1990s, he recalled, the Grand was a favorite haunt for communist officials and, after they left, for armed goons bent on keeping Kosovo part of Serbia.

Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia’s longtime dictator, had a suite on the fourth floor. After Tito died in 1980 and his multiethnic country began to unravel, the Grand soldiered on and even prospered for a time, its occupancy rate lifted by the arrival of foreign journalists and Serb paramilitary gangs that wanted to purge Kosovo of ethnic Albanians, who made up a large majority of the population.

Zeljko Raznatovic, a Serbian career criminal and bloodthirsty nationalist fanatic better known as Arkan, commandeered Tito’s old suite while his gunmen put up a sign on the front door barring entry to ethnic Albanians and dogs.

On my first day at the hotel on my recent visit, a group of revelers from a grimy nightclub on the top floor took rooms in the middle of the night and boosted the number of guests to five--an occupancy rate of 1 percent, which is about as good as business gets at the Grand these days.

“We are ready every day to operate at full capacity but there are no people,” said Mr. Fazliu, the general manager. He works out of a huge office on the second floor equipped with a long wooden conference table, multiple telephones and other relics of better and busier days.

Stuck in limbo since the end of the Kosovo war, which brought Mr. Thaci and his comrades in the Kosovo Liberation Army to power, the hotel stands as a bleak monument not only to Kosovo’s painful past but also to its blurry future.

Free of Serbian control for nearly 20 years and now celebrating its 10th anniversary as an independent country, Kosovo is itself stuck in limbo, recognized by the United States and most European countries but still denied a seat at the United Nations and routinely harassed by Russia and Serbia.

It only recently got its own telephone country code--383--while still mostly using codes 377 and 386 borrowed from Monaco and Slovenia. Meanwhile, iPhones do not offer weather reports for Pristina.

However, many of the problems plaguing Kosovo--in particular, endemic corruption and shady dealings by former commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army--are of the country’s own making.

I had last visited the Grand Hotel on June 12, 1999, the day NATO ground troops first entered Pristina after a 78-day bombing campaign. A jittery receptionist told me then that all the rooms were booked and would be for a long time.

The city was then swarming with foreigners looking for a place to stay--Western journalists, military officers, aid workers and European officials.

We had all rushed to Pristina to witness the end of Serb hegemony and the birth of what the United States and its European allies hoped would be a prosperous new country firmly anchored in the West and its ways.

A critical part of this plan was a crash program to privatize former Yugoslav state assets like the Grand Hotel. Put up for sale in 2006, it was bought by a murky local company that paid just 8 million euros (a little under $10 million at current rates) but promised, as part of the deal, to invest a further 20 million euros.

The promised investment never happened, and in 2012 the Kosovo Privatization Agency canceled the sale--and kept the money it had received. Plans to find another buyer then got snarled in a lengthy legal battle after Behgjet I. Pacolli, a Swiss millionaire originally from Kosovo who is now the country’s foreign minister, announced that a company he owned was suing the government over the original sale.

The hotel is now in liquidation and its assets, which include a valuable collection of modern art, will be sold or put in a museum so that a new owner can be found and the hotel can be refurbished from scratch.

The hotel has more than 500 employees left on the books from the time when Kosovo was controlled by Serbia. The Serbian staff all fled after NATO’s arrival. Around 80 staff, all ethnic Albanians, now show up for work.

Mr. Pacolli estimates that it will cost at least $50 million to make the Grand grand again. It is, he added, perhaps not the world’s worst hotel but ranks near the bottom. “It is really terrible,” he said. “How can you stay there? How can anyone stay there?”

[apelmedia]

Kreu i AKR-së, Behgjet Pacolli ka vendosur ti japë disa sugjerime palëve politike të Kosovës në kushtet kur Gjykata Kushtetuese ka anuluar ligjin për Grupin negociator me Serbinë. Përmes një postimi Pacolli shkruan se ka ardhur koha për një ligj të ri, i cili duhet t’i besohet Komisionit të Venecias. “Ky ligj duhet të përcaktojë qartë: çfarë bën presidenti, çfarë kryeministri, çfarë të tjerët, si bashkëpunohet, si miratohet produkti i marrëveshjes, etj. Kush do ta bëjë ligjin? Shumë shpejt i duhet besuar një pale të tretë dhe të besueshme. Pse jo Komisionit të Venecias? Palët këtu në Kosovë vetem do të obligohëshin që ta zbatonin”, thotë Pacolli. Ndërkaq ai u bën thirrje Presidentit Hashim Thaçi dhe kryeministrit Albin Kurti të bashkëpunojnë për zgjidhjen e dialogut dhe për hapat që duhen të ndërmarrin në vazhdim. “Qasja e qeverisë Kurti ndaj dialogut është preteksti. Këtu duhet të përmirësojmë sjelljen dhe të kthejmë procesin në kohërat më të mira. I bëj thirrje qeverisë: referojuni eksperiencave më të mira që Kosova ka patur në procesin e mëhershëm të dialogut, duke nisur që nga Rambujeja. Studiojeni dhe qasjen e palës tjetër. Nuk duhet të lejojmë që të përmbysen rolet. Nuk duhet të lejojmë që presioni të jetë mbi Kosovën. Presioni si në Rambuje duhet të jetë mbi Serbinë”. https://www.instagram.com/p/B9eXPmfJn9A/?igshid=c07gabshcjeb

[xhemilbeharaj]

Rama darkë tek Pacolli

Rama darkë tek Pacolli

Gjatë vizitës në Kosovë, kryeministri Edi Rama ka qenë mysafir në shtëpinë e ish-Presidentit, Behgjet Pacolli. Bie në sy se në tavolinë janë ministra të Ramës dhe biznesmenë të njohur të Kosovës. Kjo darkë u organizua mbrëmjen e së dielës, një ditë para mbajtjes së mbledhjes së përbashkët të dy qeverive. 

[overthedoors]

Grand Hotel Pristina, Pacolli porta il Kosovo all'arbitrato internazionale

Grand Hotel Pristina – Jelena Prtorić Il ministro degli Esteri kosovaro Behgjet Pacolli si scontra con l’amministrazione dello stato sulla proprietà del Grand Hotel Pristina, simbolo della città e oggi semi-abbandonato. Una situazione che rischia di provocare un evidente conflitto di interessi La penombra ed il silenzio accolgono i viaggiatori che varcano oggi le porte del Grand Hotel Pristina.…

[naishtedikur]

Pacolli, Në Krujë do ndërtoj një pallat për 3 muaj

Pacolli, Në Krujë do ndërtoj një pallat për 3 muaj

Gjatë vizitës së tij në Krujë dhe Thumanë, kryeministri Rama shoqërohej nga zv.kryeministri dhe ministri i Jashtëm i Kosovës, Behgjet Pacolli, dhe deputetja Eglantina Gjermeni.

Në takim, Pacolli, i cili ka dhuruar 1 milion euro për të prekurit nga tërmeti i 26 nëntorit në Shqipëri, bëri një tjetër premtim, teksa tha se do të ndërtojë vetë banesa për ata që mbetën pa çati në kokë.

“Aty ku…

[apelmedia]

Kosova rrezikon të humbasë miliona euro në rastet e arbitrazheve ndërkombëtare. Republika e Kosovës aktualisht është palë e paditur në katër raste të arbitrazhit në fushën e investimeve. Në mesin e kompanive që kanë dorëzuar padi është edhe kompania e ish-Ministrit të Punëve të Jashtme, Behgjet Pacollit. “MABCO Constructions”, e ka paditur Qeverinë e Kosovës, përkatësisht Ministrinë e Drejtësisë, lidhur me rastin e Hotel Grandit, të cilin Pacolli e kishte blerë, por që më pas i ishte anuluar ky privatizim. Ish-zëvendëskryeministri Behgjet Pacolli ka reaguar duke thënë se ai personalisht nuk ka kërkuar që shteti i Kosovës t’t paguajë diçka. Pacolli ka shkruar se kompania e tij kërkon vetëm kthimin e mjeteve të veta. Postimi i Behgjet Pacollit: https://www.instagram.com/p/B9ePQLjJYdZ/?igshid=o6um5mdahz4a

[metingulerce]

Güneydoğu Avrupa İşbirliği Süreci bir yıllığına Kosova'da

Güneydoğu Avrupa İşbirliği Süreci bir yıllığına Kosova’da

Kosova, Güneydoğu Avrupa İşbirliği Süreci (SEECP) dönem başkanlığını devraldı.

KOSOVA BİR YILLIĞINA SEECP BAŞKANLIĞI YAPACAK

Kosova Dışişleri Bakanı Behgjet Pacolli, Güneydoğu Avrupa İşbirliği Süreci (SEECP) liderliğini Kosova’nın devraldığını açıkladı. Kosova bir yıllığına SEECP başkanlığı yapacak.

Bakan Pacolli, Priştine’de düzenlediği basın toplantısında, Kosova’nın yapacağı başkanlık…

[xhemilbeharaj]

Ja çfarë flitet për Ronela Hajatrin në Zvicër, Itali dhe Francë

Ja çfarë flitet për Ronela Hajatrin në Zvicër, Itali dhe Francë

Ish Presidenti dhe ministri i jashtëm i Kosovës, Behgjet Pacolli ka reaguar pas eliminimit të Ronela Hajatit nga Eurovision Mbrëmë këngëtarja shqiptare mori kritika interesante për paraqitjen e saj, ndërkaq të parët që e ngacmuan atë ishin britanikët. Megjithatë, Pacolli ka një mendim për këtë. “Ronela Hajati nuk u kualifikua në finalen e madhe të  Song Contest të Eurovizionit 2022 për shkak…

[ubuntunews-blog]

Kosovo Government Denies Ban On Serbian Officials, Deepening Confusion

Kosovo Government Denies Ban On Serbian Officials, Deepening Confusion - https://ubuntu.news/kosovo-government-denies-ban-on-serbian-officials-deepening-confusion/ PRISTINA -- Kosovo’s government has denied there was a ban on Serbian officials entering the country, contradicting the Foreign Ministry and deepening confusion in Pristina.The comment July 5 by spokeswoman Donjeta Gashi came one day after an adviser to Foreign Minister Behgjet Pacolli announced that no officials from Serbia would

[kanalmalatya]

Karadağ İle Kosova Arasında Sorun Kalmadı

Karadağ İle Kosova Arasında Sorun Kalmadı

Kosova Dışişleri Bakanı Behgjet Pacolli, Priştine ziyaretini gerçekleştirmekte olan Karadağ Dışişleri Bakanı Srdjan Darmanoviç ile görüştü. Görüşme, iki ülke arasında sınır çizgisinin belirlenmesine ilişkin anlaşmanın imzalanmasının birinci yıldönümünde gerçekleşti.

İki ülke Dışişleri Bakanları sınır çizgisinin belirlenmesi konusunun, çözümlenmiş bir konu olduğunu değerlendirdi. Sorunun…