Controversial businessman Ron Yeffet drew up a plan to seize the development and production rights to the Delvina gas field, one of Albania’s most significant. Those rights are currently held by a private company, Delvina Gas Company.
Recordings of conversations in January 2026 between Yeffet and two Ukrainian businessmen, released by former Deputy Prime Minister Arben Ahmetaj, show that Yeffet had worked out a detailed scheme.
In the recordings, he assures the Ukrainians that he will “handle” the Ministry of Energy and secure the decisions they need.
Exit.al explains the scheme Yeffet proposed and sets out the key facts about the Delvina gas field.
How the scheme would work
Yeffet tells the Ukrainians that the Delvina rights would be taken over using the same model he used with Kayo, the state defence company, to secure a monopoly on supplying the Albanian army with a range of military equipment.
The scheme he describes has several steps:
— First, the government would terminate Delvina Gas Company’s concession and take back control of the field, along with the rights to develop it.
— The rights would then pass to a wholly state-owned company, either a new one set up by the government or an existing one such as the state-owned Albpetrol. Whichever company is used, Yeffet says it would work exactly like Kayo in the defence sector. Throughout the conversation, he refers repeatedly to “the Kayo model”.
— Next, the state company would form a joint venture with a private partner—the latter holding a majority stake and controlling the venture. The private partner would be the Ukrainians’ own company.
— Finally, the public-private joint venture, controlled by the Ukrainians, would be granted the rights to develop and produce gas at Delvina.
— Yeffet also promises that the venture would be given the right to run the Vlora power plant on gas from Delvina. The Ukrainians, for their part, promise to build a pipeline to carry the gas to Vlora.
Yeffet speaks for the government
Whenever the Ukrainians ask about the government’s role, Yeffet assures them that they do not need to worry about the government side on the deal. He will arrange everything with them.
When they ask whether they should submit a formal expression of interest to the Ministry of Energy to get things started, Yeffet is adamant that no formal steps are needed.
“Leave the Ministry of Energy to me! I’ll deal with them! No official letters — I’ll deal with them!” Yeffet insists.
He tells them again that they should focus only on the technical side of the private company that would partner with the state. He would take care of everything needed to set up the partnership himself, informally.
At the time of the conversation, in January 2026, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Energy was run by Belinda Balluku.
She left the government on 26 February 2026 and is now under investigation by SPAK, Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecution Office, on charges of corruption and money laundering.
Yeffet and Balluku appear to have stayed in touch since she stepped down as minister: in early July, the two had lunch together.
Yeffet’s plan for dealing with Washington
It is unclear why, but in the conversation Yeffet appears to be aware that a Ukrainian takeover of the Delvina gas field could draw a reaction from the US Embassy in Tirana.
For that reason, he tells the Ukrainians to register a company in the United States to act as the American partner in the venture with the Albanian government, concealing the Ukrainian owners.
That way, Yeffet tells the Ukrainians, the US Embassy would be in no position to object:
“I recommend that your shares in this company not be Ukrainian but American, because it’s much better for it to look American… The shares won’t be held by Igor [one of the Ukrainians] but by an American company that is going into partnership with the Albanian government. And that way we shut the American Embassy up. We shut them up with the American company.”
How much gas does the Delvina field hold
Delvina Gas Company holds the concession for the so-called Delvina Block, an area of about 234 square kilometres around the town of Delvina.
According to the company’s own figures, exploration so far has found an estimated 40 billion cubic metres of gas. At current prices, that volume of gas would be worth at least 10 billion euros.
The company believes the block may hold a further 45 billion cubic metres, but confirming this would require more exploration, as well as an assessment of whether producing the gas would be commercially viable.
To make the gas marketable, the company has also built a plant to remove sulphur from it.
Why has production not started
Although the field is ready to go into production, Delvina Gas has not started producing because it has no way to get the gas to market.
Albania has no natural gas grid. Households and small businesses use liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) delivered in portable cylinders, which is a different product from natural gas. Consumption is relatively low.
The only commercially viable use for natural gas inside the country would be to fuel gas-fired power plants.
There is currently only one, in Vlora, and it has never operated since construction was completed in 2011. Bringing it online would require further investment, but the government has no plans to do so, at least in the short term.
Building new power plants, a relatively expensive undertaking, has attracted no interest from private investors so far.
Without a large domestic customer, the only way to make the Delvina field pay is to export the gas.
Gas can be exported by pipeline, but TAP — the only pipeline linking Albania to other countries — has no entry point for gas produced in Albania, and its capacity is reserved mainly for gas from Azerbaijan.
The alternative is to liquefy the gas and ship it to foreign markets by LNG tanker.
That would require a liquefaction plant, and Albania currently has none. Building one would cost hundreds of millions of euros, depending on its capacity.
Although the government has spoken in recent years about attracting investment in liquefied natural gas, it has yet to put forward a specific investment plan or policy.
In short, getting Delvina’s gas to market, whether at home or abroad, requires investment in infrastructure.
For that reason, Delvina Gas Company has decided for now to shut in the gas it has discovered until it can invest in the capacity to liquefy, transport and export it.
Who owns Delvina Gas Company
Delvina Gas Company was registered in Albania in January 2016 as a branch of a foreign company of the same name, incorporated in the British Virgin Islands.
According to its beneficial ownership filing, Albanian businessman Sokol Meqemeja held 90% of the company until 2025. The minority owners were hidden behind a series of offshore companies.
Delvina Gas acquired the concession for the Delvina block in 2016, just a few months after it was set up, from TransAtlantic Albania.
TransAtlantic had held the rights since 2014, when it bought Stream Oil & Gas. The latter had been awarded in 2007 a concession for several oil and gas fields, including Delvina.
While the Delvina rights were transferred to Delvina Gas Compant, the state took back TransAtlantic/Stream Oil & Gas’s other licences.
Over the state’s actions, Stream Oil & Gas — through GBC Oil, which had acquired it in 2016 — won an arbitration case against the Albanian government in 2020. Albania was ordered to pay the company about 12.7 million dollars.
After the government refused to pay, companies linked to Stream Oil obtained an order in March 2026 from a federal court in Washington, DC, allowing them to enforce the award against Albania.
The Albanian government is trying to use procedural motions in the same court to prevent its assets in the United States from being seized to pay the award.
A new clash between the government and the current concession holder
In July 2025, police issued an arrest warrant for Delvina Gas owner Sokol Meqemeja and detained several company employees. Police acted on a criminal complaint filed by the National Territorial Protection Inspectorate and the Environmental Inspectorate alleging that the company was building a power plant on public land without a permit.
The investigation was later dropped for lack of evidence, but the company said the move was the latest in a series of attempts to pressure it into handing control to private interests with ties to the government.
The company says the government has obstructed its work by withholding a development permit provided for in the concession agreement, refusing other operating permits and imposing fines, among other measures.
Sources familiar with the matter told Exit.al that, in the face of this alleged political pressure, the company’s main owner went looking for foreign partners who could offer the company protection and help develop the field.
Indeed, in mid-2025 the company changed its ownership structure, bringing in a minority Dutch partner. Other changes followed later.
Current owners are now hidden behind shell companies registered in several countries, including British Virgin Islands, the Netherlands and Cyprus. The only individual listed as a beneficial owner is a Dutch national, Hein Frens.
Exit.al has also learned that an American citizen with political connections in Washington became an indirect owner of the company a few months ago.
The change of ownership appears to have paid off. In March 2026, the Dutch ambassador and the US chargé d’affaires in Tirana attended a ceremony at one of the company’s sites.
The US Embassy posted photos of the visit on Facebook with the caption: “President Trump is driving a new era of growth in American energy production, with American investments strengthening global energy security.”
Perhaps as intended, the two diplomats’ presence was widely seen as a show of support for a business with Dutch and American investors.
Lobbying in Washington
But these moves were not the company’s only line of defence against the alleged political pressure.
As early as September 2025, Delvina Gas Company hired the US lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs.
The scope of the contract offers an indirect sign of the pressure the company may be facing: Mercury is to develop an “investor protection” strategy for Delvina Gas and a narrative about its contribution to transatlantic energy security, with the aim of influencing senior political circles in the United States.
Under the contract, which is still in force, Mercury is paid a fixed retainer of 100,000 dollars a month, plus travel and other expenses.
It is one of the largest lobbying contracts linked to Albania and a rare example of lobbying by a company operating in the country.
Will Yeffet’s scheme go ahead now that it has been exposed?
By January 2026, when Yeffet was talking to the Ukrainians, Delvina Gas had already brought in Dutch investors, and the American lobbying firm had been working for it for several months.
That Yeffet sounded so sure he could deliver the field to the Ukrainians — without a formal application, and despite the foreign ownership and the lobbying in Washington — shows that he believed he had considerable influence over the government.
Now his conversations with the Ukrainians have been made public, and the clientelist “Kayo model” has been exposed.
Can Yeffet’s plan still go ahead under these circumstances?
That remains to be seen.
One thing is clear, however: if the government terminates the existing concession agreement, the dispute would most likely end up in arbitration, where Albania could face damages claims running into tens, possibly hundreds, of millions of euros.
In that scenario, the only winners would be Yeffet and the Ukrainians. The big losers, once again, would be Albanian citizens.
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