Prime Minister Edi Rama promised total transparency in response to the protests against his government.
Sidestepping their real causes, he argued that poor communication with citizens was one of the main reasons for the anger that spilt onto the streets in what became known as the Flamingo Revolution.
His answer was Besa, a pledge founded on transparency and on communicating every major government decision, programme and policy, even before it was taken.
Two days ago, the prime minister unveiled the first fruit of that pledge: a transparency portal called the Flamingo Mirror.
Yet it looks less like a tool for transparency than another instrument of propaganda.
The Zvërnec file: transparency fails its first test
In the Besa document, the prime minister declared that the first test of his new way of governing would be transparency over the Zvërnec development. Fittingly, Zvërnec is the first file on the portal.
The file contains an assortment of secondary documents: correspondence between institutions, opinions from various agencies, the signature pages of meeting minutes and the like.
What it lacks are the core documents and key decisions, including:
— The development permit.
— The conditional building permit, later withdrawn.
— The master plans: one rejected, one approved.
— The permit for site preparation works.
— The names of the design and consultancy firms.
— The names of the investors and their local partners.
—‚ The value and structure of the financing.
Below, I go through each of these gaps in turn.
The development permit. Prime Minister Rama has stated that the National Territorial Council (NTC) granted the development permit for Zvërnec in April 2026.
Faktoje.al published a facsimile of a letter from the Territorial Development Agency (TDA) informing the developer that the permit had been issued.
Issued by the NTC, a development permit sets the planning parameters for a site.
Among other things, it specifies the maximum site coverage, the building intensity (the total permitted floor area), the maximum building height and the amount of public green space.
In short, the development permit contains everything needed to understand what will be built in Zvërnec.
None of this has been posted on the Flamingo Mirror, and none of it has ever been made public.
The original building permit. The developer, Zvërnec South Adriatic Development shpk (ZSAD), applied for a building permit in early 2025. The NTC reviewed the application and granted conditional approval in January 2025.
As the TDA confirmed to Faktoje.al, the company withdrew its application in March 2025, so the permit never took effect.
Neither the permit nor its conditions or the withdrawal request appear on the portal, and none of them has ever been made public.
The masterplans. Two vision masterplans have been drawn up for the project: one was rejected, the other approved.
Prime Minister Rama informed that the developer submitted a master plan in 2024. We analysed that proposal after a copy was leaked to the public.
According to the prime minister, the NTC considered this masterplan in September 2024 but refused to approve it, calling for a fundamental overhaul: notably a lower development density and specific measures to protect the lagoon.
In an info brief on his official website, the prime minister says all of these requirements are on record. Yet neither the masterplan nor the NTC’s decision nor the requested changes have been published on the transparency portal or anywhere else.
In the same statement, he said that in March 2026 “the investors came back before the National Territorial Council with a new draft masterplan reflecting the parameters requested by the council.”
According to the prime minister, the NTC approved this masterplan and issued the development permit on that basis.
The approved masterplan has not been published either on the portal or anywhere else.
The site preparation permit. Before the protests broke out, the developer, or someone acting on its behalf, had cut and gravelled access roads, poured concrete foundations, dug a channel through the wetland, felled trees and flattened dunes to clear the site.
In an investigation into these works, BIRN revealed that they began in early May 2026. In April, the NTC had issued a permit for ancillary infrastructure and site preparation, subject to a number of conditions.
The prime minister describes it as a “permit to fence off private property for development”, apparently to justify the barbed-wire fence that sparked the residents’ revolt.
As BIRN reports, the preparatory works began before the permit had even been formally issued.
Neither the permit nor the accompanying documents have been posted on the Flamingo Mirror.
The design and consultancy firms. Prime Minister Rama has repeatedly and proudly claimed that the world’s leading architecture, engineering and environmental firms are working on Zvërnec. Yet who these firms are, and what exactly they are doing, has never been disclosed.
More importantly, the prime minister has said that an environmental impact assessment (EIA) is under way. There is no information on who is carrying it out.
Nor is it clear why the government is involved in the assessment at all. Preparing an EIA is the developer’s job; the government’s role is to review it independently and, on that basis, grant or refuse the building permit.
The investors. The main investors are confirmed to be two Syrian brothers based in Qatar, Moutaz and Ramez Al-Khayyat. But the identity of the other investors, concealed behind shell companies registered in Luxembourg and the United States, remains unknown, as do their local partners.
Equally unclear is the role of several individuals and companies clearly involved in the development, whose part in it has never been publicly explained.
The role of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump is particularly murky. Kushner’s companies said they are neither financing nor involved in the project, yet the couple have promoted it in public.
Nor is the role of the Kastrati Group any clearer. According to BIRN, the group has been active in negotiating land purchases with residents and in damping down local opposition, and its machinery has carried out works in Zvërnec.
Questions over who stands behind the project and what part each player has in it become all the more troubling given that, despite its legal problems and public opposition, only two people have spoken up for it publicly: Prime Minister Rama and the businessman Artur Shehu.
Shehu, who sold part of the land on which the resort is to be built, is under investigation and wanted by the Special Prosecution Office (SPAK) on serious criminal charges.
The transparency portal sheds no light whatsoever on the investors, developers or contractors, or on the roles they play.
The value and structure of the financing. Prime Minister Rama is the only person to have put a figure on the investment: around €4 billion.
Where that figure comes from is unclear, since there is still no final design and no building permit.
More important, though, is how the project will be financed.
The prime minister repeatedly implies that the investment will be funded entirely and directly by the investor, that is, by the Syrian brothers.
Yet we have argued that the only economically viable way to finance a development on this scale is by selling real estate. The first vision master plan, leaked to the media and sent back by the government for revision, appears to bear this out.
A portal of opacity
Prime Minister Rama promised that the Flamingo Mirror would be where the “flamingos” found their answers: every document on projects under development, nothing but the facts, a reply to every question citizens might ask.
Its first test proved the opposite.
The portal publishes what the government chooses to show and stays silent on precisely the handful of documents that would answer the questions that brought people onto the streets: what is to be built in Zvërnec, on what scale, by whom, and with whose money.
That silence hardly looks accidental. The missing documents are the very ones that would explain the government’s least defensible decisions.
How could a building permit be approved, even conditionally, in January 2025, when the first masterplan had been rejected four months earlier and the second would not be submitted until March 2026?
On what basis were roads cut, concrete poured, dunes destroyed and trees felled beside the lagoon before any building permit existed?
Transparency is measured not by the number of documents uploaded, but by whether citizens can understand how and why a decision was taken.
If the government is serious about passing its first test, the list of what it needs to publish is short:
— the development permit, with all its planning parameters;
— the NTC’s conditional building permit of January 2025, and the company’s withdrawal request;
— the permit for the access roads and site preparation;
— both master plans, with the relevant minutes and decisions;
— the names of the design firms and of those preparing the environmental impact assessment;
— the beneficial owners of the investing companies and the financing structure.
None of these documents is a state secret. Most are administrative acts that citizens are entitled to request under the Right to Information Law, portal or no portal.
Until then, the prime minister has built not a mirror for the flamingos but a black hole from which no information escapes.
Shpërndaje te miqtë
