“Comment is free, but facts are sacred.” — C. P. Scott, 1921.
Negotiation without competition: How the Library project was awarded to a private company
In this article
The Albanian Investment Corporation (KISH) was negotiating directly with the company “X-One” while public calls for the construction of the National Library were failing one after another.
In January 2025, the Corporation announced the call to develop the Library with a private partner. The incentive was clear: whoever undertook the construction would gain the right to build a tower with a floor area of up to 60,000 m² in the area of the former German villas.
But no bids were submitted. The second call, opened in March, also failed.
While these calls were under way, documents obtained by Citizens.al show that the Corporation had begun communicating with “X-One” about direct negotiations. The company is known for its plan to build three towers of up to 71 floors not far from the site where the Library is expected to be built.
On 30 July 2025, the parties signed a contract, without a competitive process, without competition and under the shadow of favoritism.
“Copëzat” (“Fragments”): The mechanism that ensured secrecy
The contract signed between KISH and X-One, a copy of which Citizens.al holds, is called “Copëzat,” a technical title that may distract attention, but conceals an agreement with a significant urban impact.
“Copëzat” is the name of the project through which the government gave the Corporation the spaces between apartment blocks on “Adem Jashari” Street, unusable as separate properties but apparently useful to X-One.
Part of the footprint of the three-tower “Grand Park Skyline” project that X-One plans to build falls precisely on these fragments of land, and it is unclear how the company obtained a development permit without owning the entire property footprint.
KISH told Citizens.al that, for this direct procedure, it relied on the procedural regulations (which could not be accessed online) and Council of Ministers Decision (VKM) 137/2024, which, according to the institution, provides that when the state-owned property is smaller than the private partner’s property, the Corporation may negotiate directly, without a competitive procedure.
Citizens.al asked the Corporation for a copy of the regulations cited and a more detailed explanation, because a full examination of the VKM in question gives the impression that this is a reinterpretation, as this approach is not expressly stated in the act.
The Corporation clarified that the legal basis it had used was point 3, letter “k” of VKM 137/2024, where the “direct negotiation procedure” is defined as the direct selection of a partner when there is “its special relationship with the investment project or with the characteristics associated with the property” or when the project “constitutes an innovation/is new to the domestic market or visibly and directly increases the value of the property”.
It also cited VKMs 12/2025 and 326/2025 as specific authorizations. But Citizens.al’s checks found neither specific authorization from the government nor specific circumstances reported by KISH.
In its latest response, the Corporation referred to a public link where, it said, the “Regulations on Competitive Procedures” could be found, although they had previously been inaccessible on the official website.
This is the legal opening through which the negotiations with X-One were legitimized. The company is led by entrepreneur Ylli Ujka in partnership with Çesk Ivanaj and Ilir Trebicka.
Negotiations over properties not yet owned
The Corporation initially told Citizens.al that it contributed 12 “fragments of state-owned land” to this agreement, with a total area of 2,702 m², “ranging from 5 to 1,114 m² each.”
But checks reveal a serious problem. When negotiations with “X-One” began (April 2025), KISH did not yet own at least 9 of these properties: 4/112, 4/113, 4/114, 4/119, 4/443, 4/450, 4/855, 4/860 and 4/861.
In its later response, the Corporation explained that VKM 326/2025 had initially transferred 9 properties, but one of them (4/119) was subsequently divided into three new properties (4/979; 4/980; 4/981), bringing the number to 11, while the 12th property (4/869), it said, had been transferred separately through VKM 12/2025.
Eleven of the 12 properties are “tails” of land parcels lying vacant between pavements and apartment blocks on “Adem Jashari” Street. They were transferred to the Corporation only on 11 June 2025 through VKM 326/2025, while negotiations had begun as early as 23 April.
In other words, the Corporation entered into negotiations over properties it did not yet own.
It disputed this conclusion by Citizens.al, emphasizing in a later written response that “the negotiation procedure initiated on 23.04.2025 concerns only property no. 4/869”, while negotiations over the other properties proceeded after their transfer through VKM 326/2025.
According to the Corporation, “in no case were negotiations conducted over properties that were not yet owned by the Corporation, but only preparatory and coordinating actions”.
In return, the Corporation claims it will receive 40% of the above- and below-ground floor area on the properties covered by the contract: around 25,963 m2, with a stated value of 65.7 million euros.
In its response, the Corporation explains that this value was calculated on the basis of the floor area it receives under the agreement and the “official reference prices for the area where the project will be developed”, as a result of the inclusion of 2,702.88 m² of state-owned property in the project.
This value, which in reality is still merely imaginary, will, according to the contract, be used to finance the construction of the National Library by “X-One”.
At first glance, the scheme appears workable: the state provides land and receives financing for an important public building in return. But the chronology of events overturns this logic.
- On 14 February 2025, “X-One” submitted its request for cooperation, protocol number 128.
- On 13 March, the Corporation opened the second public call for private partners for the Library.
- On 17 March, just four days later, the Corporation sent “X-One” an invitation to submit a proposal, protocol number 178.
- On 7 April, the public call for the Library closed without any bids.
- On 23 April, negotiations with the company “X-One” officially began.
- On 30 July, the parties signed the contract.
The chronology shows that the competitive process and the direct negotiations proceeded in parallel. In practice, the partner appears to have been selected in advance.
The Corporation has not explained why it did not open a new competitive procedure after April 2025, or why it began corresponding with X-One while the second public call for the Library was still open.
Since January 2025, Citizens.al has closely followed the Corporation’s work, as well as major construction projects, as part of its “Tirana Vertikale” (“Vertical Tirana”) series.
This ongoing reporting has also covered X-One’s ambitious Grand Park Skyline project, with three towers of 40, 51 and 71 floors, designed by Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati. They are expected to rise at the entrance to the lake park, and the project’s footprint overlaps four existing apartment blocks and private buildings on “Adem Jashari” Street.
If we examine the circumstances in the context of current developments, we see that X-One had obtained the development permit for this project as early as 31 July 2024, around six months before its request of 14 February 2025 for cooperation with the Corporation concerning the “fragments of land” owned by the state (2,702.88 m²) that form part of the project’s footprint.
We can therefore say that the contract with the Corporation was not a precondition for the development permit, but a consequence of it.
The National Library project, then, did not emerge as the objective that prompted “X-One” to invest, but as the instrument for obtaining public property within its own project, which had already been approved for development.
This can be understood from the fact that, after reaching an agreement with the Corporation, “X-One” applied for a construction permit, a request that appears on the KKTU’s agenda for 29 September 2025.
The government presents the agreement as a success story: “X-One will undertake the cost of financing the National Library.” But the procedures followed for this agreement are questionable, and once again show what has become of the principles of competition, transparency and decision-making in the public interest.
What is missing from the contract?
The notarized contract of 30 July 2025 is a document drafted with legal care. Yet that very care raises some important questions.
The Corporation claims that the potential development of 25,963 m² on the “fragments of land” it negotiated is worth 65.7 million euros. But this value must derive from the “reference price” under the VKM, so logically it should be an administratively set price, not a market price.
The signed contract does not identify who carried out the independent valuation. Even in its latest response, sent electronically on 5 May, the Corporation did not refer to an independent valuation report, but said the value resulted from a calculation based on the parameters of the agreement and the reference prices.
Meanwhile, the Library project remained at the concept stage, and the Corporation itself stressed in the calls issued between January and April 2025 that whichever private partner was declared the winner would also undertake the costs of developing the detailed design.
The Corporation argues that the cost estimate was based on “standard methodologies for preliminary analysis”, including comparisons with similar projects, average costs per square meter and urban-planning parameters, and that this is a “preliminary and indicative” estimate.
So, for the Corporation, there was no problem with the Library project still lacking its detailed design. Meanwhile, X-One did not respond to requests for comment on these points.
But the aspect of this agreement that raises the most questions is the fact that the guarantee provided is only 2%.
The Corporation says that the level of the guarantee was set “on the basis of international best practices” and in accordance with its internal regulations.
So if X-One fails to build the Library, the Corporation can call on the contractual guarantee, which, under article 2.7.1 of the contract, is set at 2 percent of the investment value of the Corporation’s share, as proposed by the developer, excluding taxes. The guarantee amount is revised if the investment value approved in the construction permit changes. But given the Library’s importance and the fact that this project has dragged on for 5-6 years, this offers no protection at all.
The company “X-One” is registered at an address on “Lidhja e Prizrenit” Street in Tirana, with Ylli Ujka from Lezha as its administrator.
Ujka’s partners are the two entrepreneurs Çesk Ivanaj and Ilir Trebicka. The latter, with the company “Trema Tech,” won the competition to develop the “Asllan Rusi Sports Palace” into a concrete ball with mixed commercial and residential uses, estimated to require an investment of around 109 million euros.
But no authority has publicly assessed this group of investors’ financial capacity and actual ability to invest around 400 million euros in the three “Grand Park Skyline” towers, as well as around 55 million euros in the Library.
The group of investors and the Corporation itself did not respond to Citizens.al’s additional requests for comment on this development, which had not been made public or presented before.
A recurring model
The story of the National Library project has clear parallels with other public works developments in Tirana, such as the “Qemal Stafa” National Stadium, the Pyramid, the National Theatre and others.
The theatre itself was demolished on the justification that a private investor such as the company Fusha, which was donating the new design conceived by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels without anyone having asked it to, would rebuild it with its own financing, gaining the right to erect towers around it, including on part of the public land.
That model was strongly criticized and opposed. Parliament even passed a special law to favor this deal, despite facing accusations of constitutional violations and deals at the public’s expense.
We all know how that story went. The new theatre has still not been built, even though it was forcibly demolished in the middle of the pandemic on 17 May 2020.
The National Library is following a similar path, but with a structural difference: there is no special law, only government decisions through which the deal is reached and signed administratively, without needing to pass through Parliament, and therefore without parliamentary debate or even public debate.
This is perhaps the most concerning difference, not because the model is exactly the same as the theatre’s, but because the safeguards for transparency and decision-making have shrunk so much that everything is decided behind the scenes.
Meanwhile, the area of the former Republican Guard, where Mayor Erion Veliaj’s promise in 2018 was for a “green park, without towers”, is rapidly turning into a park of towers: X-One’s Grand Park Skyline, Nova Construction’s Platinum Tower and Artech Group-El-Prom’s Garda Tower.
In 2020, when Belgian architect Xavier De Geyter presented his concept for the new National Library, the images were inspiring: a clean, modern building, located near the Artificial Lake, open to the city and its citizens.
Five and a half years later, the Library still exists only as an annex to a 36-page notarized contract between two parties with very different interests.
If the aim was for Albania to have a worthy national library, the first and simple question is: why is such a project not financed from the state budget?
Albania spends billions of lek every year on concessions and public-private partnerships of various kinds. A cultural institution costing 60-80 million euros is not impossible to finance directly.
The experience of the National Theatre, which began as a PPP and ended up being financed directly with public money, has taught us that when political will exists, ways can be found.
So the question that remains is: what is the real will concerning the Library, and whom does it serve?
* This article was reviewed and corrected on 8 October 2026.