Tirana Times, 25 December, 2025 – On September 15, 2023, Ergys Agasi, 36, founded a company with a capital of 1 thousand lek (10 euros) with activity in the field of information technology. Under the name EA Solutions, the company had a rapid activity.
In the balance sheet filed with the National Business Center, the company in question declared revenues of 242.4 million lek and profits before income tax of 232.1 million euros, for the activity carried out from the date of establishment, September 15, 2023, until the end of the fiscal year, December 31, 2023.
With a profit-to-revenue ratio of 95.7%, a return on equity of 220,000 times, or a Return on Investment of 22 million percent, in less than four months, this could be the absolute most profitable company in human history. By comparison, early investors in tech giant Apple have averaged a 20% annual return since the company went public in 1982.
At first glance, it is unclear where the money that financed the revenue came from, nor is there a convincing explanation as to why this company was paid such large sums of money, supposedly for services that cost the company less than 4.3 lek for every 100 lek of revenue.
The Special Prosecution Office says that in fact, the unimaginable financial success of EA Solutions and its owner, Ergys Agasi, is not dedicated to any technological invention like Apple or the iPhone, but stems from a traditional mechanism: manipulation of public procurement, violence and hostage-taking against a competitor.
Agasi, now 38 years old, was declared wanted by the Special Prosecution Office on charges of illegal deprivation of liberty, illegal competition through violence and laundering of the proceeds of a criminal offense, criminal offenses committed within the framework of a structured criminal group.
Illegal deprivation of liberty is the second most serious offense in the country’s criminal legislation and carries a minimum sentence of 10 and a maximum of 20 years in prison. This is the first time that public procurement processes in Albania have been treated by the prosecution as an operation of organized crime structures.
Mirlinda Karçanaj, the long-serving director of the National Agency for the Information Society and the person who has managed hundreds of millions of euros in citizens’ taxes, was taken into custody and placed under house arrest, along with deputy director Hava Delibashi. Three businessmen, Andis Papa, Gëzim Hoxha and Rogers Rryta, were placed under house arrest and banned from leaving the country.
Stunning profits
Very high net profit ratios in relation to revenue are in fact a distinctive feature of economic entities that have won public procurements from the National Information Society Agency, AKSHI, an office under the Prime Minister’s authority, which deals with the state’s digital infrastructure.
The director of this institution, Mirlinda Karçanaj, was charged with the criminal offense of violating equality in tenders, committed in the form of cooperation within a criminal group, alongside Agas and Ermal Beqiri, another businessman who won AKSHI procurements, whose company SOFT & SOLUTION had nearly 18 million euros in revenue and almost 11 million euros in profits in 2024.
SOFT & SOLUTION was founded in 2011 and until 2020, it was a programming company with revenues ranging from 1 to 6 million euros per year, but its profits were at an unexceptional level, from almost zero to a maximum of 28% on revenues. The company experienced extraordinary success from 2021 onwards, and this seems to be related to the change of owner. The company, founded in 2011, was acquired by Beqiri in July 2021, while in 2023, it doubled its revenues, while in 2024, it tripled them compared to 2021.
In the case of Soft & Solution, as in the case of EA Solution, the key to success lay not so much in innovation as in more traditional methods of violence and competitor kidnapping. The profits were made thanks to the manipulation of public procurement processes, which were carried out at prices many times inflated compared to normal costs, at the expense of taxpayers.
The public procurement process seems inherently designed to produce abuses. According to current practice, officials, in order to calculate the “limit fund” for a procurement process, ask a number of companies, which give an opinion on the approximate cost. The average of the prices collected in this way constitutes the “limit fund”. Since the companies asked for the limit fund are the same ones that participate in the procurement procedures, their natural interest is to inflate these costs, producing abnormally high profits for contractors of public funds, at the expense of taxpayers.
The decision of the Special Court that ordered the security measure of arrest in absentia for Ergys Agasin, the owner of EA Solution, and Ermal Beqiri, the owner of Soft & Solution, notes that officers of the National Bureau of Investigation discovered that the offices of EA Solution, located in an apartment on Hoxha Tahsin Street in Tirana, were in fact the offices of a company called INGW-T, which also deals with computer programming, while the employees they found there told them that their employer was Soft & Solution. They were dealing with the State Police Case Registry.
The analysis that prosecutors conducted of the accounting books of Agas’s company concluded that in fact, EA Solution does not really exist as a physical entity but is a company which, in its activity to date, has collected nearly 8 million euros and purchased a vehicle in Germany worth 280 thousand euros.
“The lack of purchase invoices may not be problematic, given the type of activity of the company, however, due to the considerable volume of sales that this company has, there should have been some items or purchases of electronic equipment, software, etc.,” the prosecutors note.
“Based on the data […], there is a suspicion that “EA Solution” was fictitiously established, with the aim of transferring payments received from the company “Soft & Solution” to citizen Ergys Agasi,” the court’s decision further states.
In addition to the alleged fictitious invoices for Soft & Solution, EA Solution has invoiced two other entities, First and Fastech, whose owners, Gëzim Hoxha and Andis Papa, paid Agasin for unreal services, according to the Prosecution.
Secret tenders and violence
Besides Agas, the other key figure in the history of the structured criminal group suspected of involvement in the AKSHI procurements is Ermal Beqiri. The file data shows that he started his career as an employee of the Ministry of Interior in a leading position for information technology. This is the description given to him by Andis Papa, the owner of Fastech, which sold computers.
According to the court’s decision, Papa and Beqiri purchased, through their companies Fastech and Soft & Solution, services worth 10 million euros through a company that sold chocolates and other consumer goods imported from Turkey, all before 2020. After this, Beqiri appears at the center of a network of super successful companies with public procurement in the field of information technology.
He is reported to have been the intermediary who introduced Agas into the small network of AKSHI contractors and, in numerous public procurements, carried out in procedures declared “state secret”. His advantage was the possession of a Security Certificate, a document issued by the National Authority for Classified Information Security, supposedly the institution that guarantees that the Albanian state is not infiltrated by foreign agents or exponents of organized crime.
Prosecutors note that a preferred reason for AKSHI officials to classify a procurement procedure as “secret” was to thereby limit competition among candidates who potentially hold security clearances. In more than one proceeding, prosecutors conclude that the request for a security clearance was made unreasonably, intentionally to limit competition and predetermine the winner, as the procurements were made in areas where there is no classified information under applicable law. Thus, in a procurement procedure on behalf of the Civil Aviation Authority, among the criteria was set that the contractor’s employees had to have a security clearance. The tender was won by Communication Progress, a company that SPAK considers to be related to Beqiraj, because its shareholder Gentian Likaj is the cohabitant of Beqiraj’s sister. (There are no charges against Likaj and the company Communication Progress).
“…also in this procedure, the introduction of the criterion of equipping the Aviation with CSP is noted, which is inappropriate, since the data produced and communicated by the Civil Authority are not classified, and the location of the infrastructure is not classified,” the court’s decision reads.
The number of procedures obtained by cheating on the Security Certificate criteria is high.
The success of Beqiri and Agas is not entirely dedicated to the manipulation of criteria and discretion in judging the fulfillment of the criteria by the winning company, usually Soft & Solution, and the disqualification of competing companies for not meeting the conditions, when the latter made a bid with a lower price. One of the companies that did not have safety certificates for its employees was that of businessman Gerond Meçe. He not only competed in procurement processes with competitive prices, but repeatedly appealed the criteria set by AKSHI or the results.
On August 12, 2025, at around 10:30 a.m., unidentified individuals presented themselves to him, posing as officers of the National Bureau of Investigation. They kidnapped the businessman and took him to an area known as Kilometer 26 on the old Tirana-Elbasan road, where they threatened him and forced him to withdraw from the appeal proceedings, eventually allowing Beqiri to win the tenders.
Prosecutors have managed to identify one of the vehicles used in Meçe’s kidnapping as being owned by the Merkaj 3 company, which is believed to have been used as a vehicle for the circulation of dirty money by the notorious Çopja criminal group. The Çopja group was hit by SPAK in 2024, but the group’s leader and many of its exponents remain at large. The kidnapping of Meçe by suspected exponents of this group in August of this year suggests that the group is in full form and in excellent operational condition. Not only that, but their access to state information appears to be at alarming levels.
In a strange reversal of Stockholm Syndrome, in which the kidnapped person develops sympathy for the kidnapper, in this case, one of the hostage-takers, after securing what he planned to secure through threats of death and warnings to kill the kidnapped person’s family members, took off his mask and said: “If I see you in Elbasan, I will talk to you, I don’t know about you, but I will talk to you.”
In courtesy of BIRN
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