IMF: Albanians, close down the pyramid schemes
Finance Minister Bode: It is difficult for the companies to repay the loans
International Monetary Fund: Many families may lose their savings
The government is playing games with the pyramid schemes
The news about the risks facing the pyramid-scheme companies is distressing and, at the same time, dangerous. Four years after this business began, the government was forced to speak publicly about them, having left the pyramid schemes forgotten throughout this period and thereby neglected the largest source of income for Albanian citizens.
For four years running, hundreds of thousands of families, abandoned by the Democratic Party’s reforms, found their only means of survival in the risky practice of depositing money in pyramid schemes. These people, betrayed by their government, sold their homes and property or pooled years of savings in order to risk them with VEFA, Gjalllica, Kamberi or Sudja. The government, which knew all of this, which knew about the sale of homes and the hardships of living with neighbors, remained silent. It took no preventive measures to safeguard the business of the country’s largest companies, which were themselves also at risk. The government remained silent for four years and remembered to appear on TV only on the day it received an ultimatum from international organizations. The IMF has specifically called for the companies to be closed as soon as possible, because, it says, the damage to people’s pockets will be smaller. Naturally, the IMF’s conclusions are very harsh, and after this the organization can expect to be condemned by Albanians, perhaps more than all the institutions of communism combined. Nevertheless, the International Monetary Fund’s calculations were made in the dark, because the Albanian government did not provide the Washington-based organization with accurate information about the number of depositors or the amount of money deposited. The sums collected through pyramid schemes are beyond the imagination of any Albanian, and consequently the response to them should also have been more careful. Measures should have begun to be taken long ago, not today, when the giants VEFA, Gjalllica and Kamberi have perhaps amassed billions of dollars. By now, the bosses of these companies have a right to feel betrayed by their government, which did not warn them in time and did not enter into negotiations with them so that together they could avert the risks. Yesterday’s statement by the Finance Minister is an ugly appeal for people to rush to withdraw their money. There could have been other, more humane and certainly more careful ways to keep the despair of people under control; their only recourse after this is to swarm the doors of the innocent companies. For its part, instead of terrorizing Albania’s poor population, the IMF should pressure the government to license the pyramid-scheme companies and turn them into private banks, so that at least the deposits would be better guaranteed. Because what people will be demanding, starting today, is their deposits, not the interest. The IMF bureaucrats are currently on the other side of the Atlantic and will feel Albanians’ suffering only through faxes or television images. Their prescriptions are often theoretical and inapplicable to Eastern conditions. Many Eastern European countries have followed the IMF’s recommendations while blaming it for the population’s poverty and suffering. To date, only the Albanian government has obeyed Washington’s bureaucrats unconditionally, as it proved again yesterday. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, it—not the IMF—is responsible if collapse occurs. Citizens should have been made aware of the risks in good time, and the company bosses should also have been informed in a measured way. The government cannot put guarantees of withdrawal at risk in order to save its record in the IMF’s files...
BEN BLUSHI