Former political persecutees, entitled to compensation according to local legislation, will have to wait at least three decades to fully receive what has been calculated and owed to them.
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| One of the protests of the former political persecuted in Tirana, March, 2007, Deshmoret e kombit Boulevard |
The report by the Supreme State Audit Institution (SSAI) observes that at the current pace, where each year an insignificant amount is allocated in the budget compared to the total, the closure of this chapter will be very long-term.
"The remaining obligation for former political persecutees until the end of 2022 is 29.88 billion lek (290 million euros), and if budgeting and fund allocation for former political persecutees continue at this rate or lower, this obligation could be settled on average after about 30 years," the report emphasizes as Monitor reports.
For the year 2024, the approved amount for this category is 1 billion lek.
The method of compensation for former political persecutees has continuously changed since the time of right-wing governance up to the present.
From 2009 to 2018, according to Ministry of Finance data, there were over 13,000 approved files applied by former political persecutees. The categories eligible for this compensation were divided into primary and secondary.
For primaries in those years, the provision of 8 installments with amounts of 1 million and no less than 100 thousand lek was approved, and it was requested to add a ninth installment because there was still undistributed compensation for some cases.
The pace of payments has been declining from year to year. So from 2010 to 2014, 7.9 billion lek were distributed. Then from 2014 to 2018, 9.1 billion lek were distributed. In the years 2019 and 2020, the amount given was 2.19 billion lek.
From 2021, including the planning made for this category in the 2024 budget, the total fund is just over 4 billion lek. So, in total, around 23 billion lek have been distributed for this category, and more than half remains still unpaid.
These are cash payments made from the state budget, while over the years there have also been other forms related to privatization advancement with privatization vouchers, where the last reported amount was in 2018 and was estimated at nearly 34 million dollars.