Compensation of owners is postponed beyond 2030, the government document is clarified, the deadline for the process and funds for compensation is extended

The Property Handling Agency will have until 2030 to review the files of former land owners. The Ministry of Justice, in a document published for public consultation on the rule of law, announces the postponement of the compensation deadline for former owners by 5 years, a process that without this change would have to end in 2025. The Ministry of Justice does not give arguments for the postponement, but one of the main reasons is the large number of stock files and the large financial value of the compensations. According to the figures that Minister Ulsi Manja himself made public in May of this year, there are about 7,000 files not yet processed by the Agency, 20,000 decisions that need to be compensated with a bill of 101 billion ALL, while only 974 owners have been liquidated. Faced with this situation, the ministry suggests that funds for compensation should first be provided, and further start the liquidation. "The gradual provision of appropriate financial support for the transitional process of property compensation within the year 2030. Substantial progress in the transitional processes of ownership within the year 2030", are two of the objectives of this strategy of the Ministry of Justice. This whole process, which started with the 2015 law, On the Treatment of Property and Completion of the Compensation Process, has been stopped due to the lawsuits of the former owners in the European Court of Human Rights, which brought about the change of the law. Now, the owners are not compensated with the value and status that the property had at the time of expropriation, but with the value it currently has, not less than 10 percent of the value of the property calculated according to the current cadastral item.

Owners' compensation may be delayed beyond 2030

Meanwhile, the process may go much further than 2030, according to the provisions of the new law on property treatment that came into force in 2015. Currently, the number of files waiting for compensation is about 26 thousand. But since 2015, very few of them have been compensated through the formula of conditional compensation, which provides for giving up up to 80% of the amount in order to receive the remaining part immediately. The Property Handling Agency informs that from 2016 until the end of last year, there are a total of 269 entities that have agreed to give up most of the compensation in exchange for receiving it out of turn. In total, about 1.7 billion Lek, or nearly 17 million dollars, were paid in installments to these subjects. It is worth mentioning, that the Property Handling Agency reports that in 2022 it has saved the budget more than 6.8 billion lek, or almost 68 million dollars through this formula. It can be said that the process of compensating the owners did not work in the last 7 years, while for two years it was completely blocked due to the suspension of two articles of the new property law by the Constitutional Court.