June 30, 2019

The Albanian Opposition Leader Was Charged with Corruption After Our Investigation. Now the Country Is Voting Again.

Sunday’s local elections were boycotted by the main opposition parties.

Albania's Prime Minister Edi Rama casts his ballot at a polling station on Sunday.Gent Shkullaku/AFP/Getty Images

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Albania’s ruling Socialist Party is expected to win sweeping power on Sunday in local elections boycotted by the main opposition parties.

Candidates from the small Balkan country’s Democratic Party and Socialist Integration Party sat out the voting as part of a months-long power struggle connected to their allegations of corruption against Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama.

But the boycott was expected to have the immediate effect of expanding Rama’s influence by allowing his party to win local power in 24 of 61 municipalities where it did not already govern. The vote came after Rama refused to heed a call by Albania’s president, Ilir Meta, whose powers are mostly ceremonial, to postpone voting.

This conflict is part of a larger clash. For months, opposition lawmakers, led by Lulzim Basha, the head of the Democratic Party, have held at times violent protests in Albania’s capital, Tirana, aimed at highlighting what they say are Rama’s connections to criminal groups involved in the country’s pervasive drug trade.

Earlier this month, a prosecutor in Tirana charged Basha with money laundering and filing false documents in connection with $600,000 in payments that his party made in 2017 to a Republican lobbyist in Washington. The charges came after Mother Jones reported, in March 2018, that a Scotland-based shell company connected to Russian nationals had bankrolled Basha’s US lobbying. The report led to accusations that Basha, who advocated relatively nationalist policies consistent with Russia’s preferences for the Balkans, had undisclosed ties to Moscow.

Ahead of Albania’s election in 2017, Basha hired Nick Muzin, a lobbyist who formerly worked for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and who also advised the Trump campaign. Muzin aimed to help Basha build ties to American conservatives and arranged for the Albanian to take a picture with President Donald Trump, which the Albanian leader touted at home.

Albanian prosecutors, citing lobbying foreign disclosure filings Muzin filed with the Justice Department, charged that Basha and two party allies had broken the country’s laws by reporting only $25,000 in lobbying payments and failing to reveal another $650,000 in payments to Muzin that came through Biniatta, the shell company.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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