In 2021, Luciano Koçeku, at that time 39 years old, born in Bulqiza and an immigrant to London, exchanged two plots of land, one of which he had bought a year earlier from the company Nova Construction 2012, with construction plots in the building that Nova Construction 2012 was going to build. Immediately after that, Koceku started looking for buyers for the apartments, among his “colleagues” in England and Belgium.
The Special Prosecutor’s Office against Corruption and Organized Crime in Tirana, SPAK, revealed six years later that these transactions were in fact part of a high number of formal legal and financial actions, which had the final goal of laundering monetary sums in the order of tens of millions of euros, which Koceku and his associates had earned in the international cocaine trade, which were invested in a number of buildings in Tirana, including buildings iconic as the Garden Building on Rruga e Kavaja, but also in many plots of land and villas on the south coast, in the area of Palasa and Gjileka.
The decision of the Special Court Against Organized Crime and Corruption, dated June 10, 2026, continues in 86 pages and has as its object the establishment of the security measure of preventive seizure for properties suspected to be products of the criminal offense of international drug trafficking. The decision lists page after page dozens of apartments, thousands of square meters of land and dozens of bank accounts with millions of euros in balance, along with other properties such as luxury vehicles, which were seized.
Eighty-two units, mostly apartments in Tirana, tens of thousands of square meters of land in Gjileka e Pala, and thousands of square meters of villas in the Green Coast tourist complexes and others, were seized.
This is likely to be the largest anti-money laundering operation in Albania’s history, and the investigation has been undertaken by prosecutors Altin Dumani and Elida Kaçkini.
Drug – Concrete
The Garden Building Palace on Rrugë e Kavajë in Tirana was built attracting attention with its unusual architectural forms, very visible exits without support on the ground and the color imitating rusted iron. Over the past few years, it has been recognized as one of the most expensive buildings in the country, although in appearance, not very heavily inhabited.
With an area of 62 thousand square meters, such a building may require a minimum of 30 million euros to build with a minimum cost of 500 euros per square meter, while its value on the open market, with current prices of 2 thousand or 3 thousand euros per square meter, may reach 100 or 200 million euros.
In the request for the seizure of suspected properties, SPAK notes that, according to the testimony of the repentant Erjon Alibej, “half of the value of the building was invested in cash by citizen Artur Koceku.” (Artur is another name of Luciano Koček).
Alibej, a former drug trafficker from Elbasan, became an associate of justice a few years ago, after a bloody war with the Çopja brothers’ gang that started with the murder of his brother and continued with a dozen killed and wounded by assassinations on both sides, including innocent people.
Speaking for the prosecutors for this investigation, Alibej described how drug money appeared in the construction market in Tirana starting in 2020, to materialize in iconic buildings, with architects promoted by Prime Minister Edi Rama himself. Behind the facade is a business world of unpaid bills, fraud and criminal fines that seem to go unreported to the justice system.
Ilir Shtufi faced debts and problems with justice due to accusations of selling an apartment several times during the construction process. Getting close to Kocek helped Shtuf to pay his debts, solve problems with justice, while, according to Alibej, “Artur’s name drove away the fines.”
Prosecutors believe that Luciano Koceku started his career as a trafficker around 2008-2009, mainly in England, while after 2015 he is believed to have entered the international drug trade, with traffic from Latin America to Europe. Financial success seems to have been marked from 2017 or 2018, when the need to invest somewhere appeared.
Kocek’s group and the infrastructure for money laundering in the form of investments in Shtufi’s palaces, constitute another case of a criminal group whose activity was revealed thanks to the interception of Sky ECC communications by the French authorities. According to one of Kocek’s communications from 2020, he is confident that his money is successfully and safely laundered.
“Skan, what’s left, I’ve arranged the letters well with credit cards for those companies I have, (SIC)” the communication is quoted.
While in reality, according to the testimony of the repentant Erjon Alibej, Koçeku behaved as the owner of the facilities that were built by Ilir Shtufi and that Shtufi’s company became the instrument and destination of the money of many other traffickers interested in transforming the income from drug trafficking into apartments and shops.
Koček and Shtufi, the prosecution has also identified many other properties. Mine Peza building, with almost 34 thousand square meters of construction, in which preventive seizure was ordered for 38% of the building and a number of apartments, a building on Stavri Themeli Street, in which 37 apartments were blocked for the sake of the investigation, as well as in the Colonade building on Dritan Hoxha Street, with an area of 31 thousand square meters, where 29 apartments were seized.
The construction boom included Tirana, the south coast and, to a more limited extent, the Golem area on the Kavaja coast starting from 2018 onwards.
Nova Construction itself became the symbol company after building many towers. Its website features such symbolic towers as Mali i Tirana or Hora Vertikale or Bond Tower, which present futuristic architecture and are currently still in the initial phase of construction. The court’s decision has imposed seizure on only three of this company’s towers, while many others have not been affected.
There have been many suspicions and accusations about the use of the construction sector for money laundering, with some cases documented by the prosecution, while the government of Prime Minister Edi Rama has insisted that such allusions are slander and mud.
Villa and land in the south
The court’s decision on imposing preventive seizures on the suspected properties of the criminal group in question describes in detail how the exponents of this organization function simultaneously as investors and as insurers of property titles. In one of the episodes of the file, it is shown how representatives of the group were sent to Vlora in search of persons who had unregistered properties, for which they enabled the registration and then the purchase. The presence of organized crime in the real estate market in Vlora is known by everyone. In one case, Edi Rama himself admitted that criminal pressure is exerted on the mortgage officers in this area, while the heads of the office are changed every few months.
Gjileka, the neighborhood of Dhërmi, which also includes the area where several blocks of villas and apartments have been built in recent years through the so-called Strategic Investor status, is mentioned at least 200 times in the court decision obtained by BIRN. At least five villas have been identified as having been purchased with proceeds from drug trafficking in this file.
A total of 11 plots of land in Gjileka with a total area of 113 thousand square meters were placed under seizure. If a price of 100 euros per square meter is assumed, the value of these plots reaches 11 million euros.
Villas in tourist villages built in recent years have often been the subject of SPAK investigations. Many of them have been placed under sequestration, one identified as the secret property of former Deputy Prime Minister Arben Ahmetaj, the other as the secret property of former Prime Minister Belinda Balluku. Businessman Samir Mane, who paved the way for construction on the coast that used to be a green zone, through the status of a strategic investor, appears several times in the file as a topic of conversation among traffickers. In one case in 2021, Artur Koçeku tells one of the associates that he spoke with Manen and the latter asked him for 3 million euros to build on the lands owned by the group in Palasa. The group’s wish was to build 40 villas and a hotel with 120 rooms. The prosecution notes that there are indications that suggest that 1 million euros were paid in cash at home. However, Manen is not charged with any charges from this file.
In total, SPAK ordered the seizure of eighteen villas, in Rolling Hills in Tirana, in Green Coast, in Gjileka and in the village of Jalë.
Thanks to Sky ECC communications, SPAK has managed to identify six cases of cargo belonging to this criminal group which have been seized by law enforcement agencies in the Netherlands or Spain. In total, the seizures attributed to the group amount to 6 tons of cocaine. Each kilogram is believed to have cost the group around 10,000 euros including transport, while the usual selling price is 25-30,000 euros per kilogram./ BIRN
