The Deed Carried No Suspension

One question in the Zvërnec file can be answered now, without waiting for any verdict and without presuming any guilt: what the state was lawfully able to do about the transfer of the land. The answer is narrow, and it is the opposite of the assumption on which a national campaign has been built.

by Renada Bici (Tirana Examiner Legal Desk)

Strip the matter to its legal core. The investigation that the Special Prosecution opened is a case about how land came into the hands of Artur Shehu and about the laundering of what its sale produced. It examines a registry, a chain of restitution decisions, a contested document, and a flow of money. It is not a case about an investor, and it is not a case about a project. Those belong to other registers entirely. The legal question that touches the state is therefore smaller than the critics suggest, and far more exact: for as long as no court suspended or prohibited the transfer of the property, what was the government permitted, or obliged, to do.

Begin with what the registry recorded. The parcels at Zvërnec stood entered in the cadastre in the names of private owners. Under Albanian law, registration carries a presumption of ownership, and the registered owner holds the right to dispose of the property. The cadastre is an administrative register. It records title; it does not adjudicate it. An entry can be wrong, it can rest on decisions later overturned, it can be the product of fraud, and none of that changes the function of the register while the entry stands. The agency that keeps the books does not sit in judgment of them.

Place beside that the litigation, which is tangled and, decisively, unfinished. The title traces to a restitution chain assembled long before the present government took office. Between 2006 and 2009 the property restitution agency returned hundreds of hectares to the family line, with Artur Shehu as direct heir, on the strength of decisions resting on a 1997 court ruling. What came after was a carousel rather than a conclusion. In one line, the Vlora District Court found for the villagers in 2013 and annulled the recognitions; that case was appealed, sat unresolved for years, and was returned to Vlora for retrial. In a parallel line, the Tirana Court of Appeal recognised the family’s ownership, the Supreme Court quashed that decision and sent it back to first instance, and there, in May of last year, the court once more recognised the family’s title. That ruling too is under appeal and undecided. In a 2024 decision the Supreme Court referred to documents used across these proceedings, among them the so called Daimi Register, as having turned out falsified, a finding the most recent first instance ruling did not engage.

This is where the law speaks plainly, and where the campaign loses its footing. None of these decisions is final. What exists is a sequence of contradictory, non final rulings, the most recent of which recognised the seller’s title rather than destroyed it. A judgment of first instance under appeal does not carry the force of res judicata; until a decision becomes final it strips no registered title and directs the cadastre to cancel no entry. A registered owner holding a fresh first instance judgment in his favour, with every adverse decision either quashed or still on appeal, is, for the purposes of the register and the right to dispose, an owner. The presence of a falsified document somewhere in that history is grave, and it may yet prove decisive when the courts conclude. It is not, by itself, an order that bars a transfer. A suspicion of fraud is the reason a court issues such an order. It is not a substitute for one.

So the position on the date the contracts were signed was this. The owner was registered. No final judgment had stripped the title. No court had issued a measure suspending or prohibiting the transfer. In that posture, the right to sell existed, and a buyer dealing with a registered owner dealt with a person the law treated as entitled to sell. The transaction that the prosecution now scrutinises was, at the moment it occurred, a private disposition of registered property unencumbered by any judicial restraint.

Against that background, ask precisely what the government could have done, and the separation of powers answers before politics does. The executive is not a court. It cannot declare a deed void. It cannot freeze a registered owner’s right to sell on the strength of suspicion. It cannot instruct the cadastre to refuse a lawful transfer because a minister, or a crowd, believes the seller is a criminal. To do any of these things would be a deprivation of property by administrative fiat, without judicial process, against a person whose title no court had removed. The Constitution forbids it in Article 41. The European Convention forbids it in the First Protocol. The accession process that Tirana asks Brussels to advance exists in no small part to extinguish exactly that reflex, the reflex of an executive that seizes first and litigates never. A government that had blocked the Zvërnec transfer by decree would not have been defending the law. It would have been breaking it, and breaking it in the precise manner the Union is watching for. Nor does a lesser, temporary restriction escape this. Even a provisional limit on a registered owner’s right to deal with his property requires a basis in statute and, for anything beyond the trivial, the control of a court. An administrative freeze improvised against a registered owner, on suspicion, with no statutory footing and no judge behind it, is not a milder version of the lawful path. It is the same unlawful act in a smaller dose.

There is, of course, a lawful way to stop the money, and it is worth naming because it is the answer to the whole complaint. The instrument designed for this situation is the precautionary sequestration. It is a judicial measure, ordered by the court on the application of the prosecutor, to freeze assets suspected to be the proceeds of crime. It does not belong to the government. It belongs to the prosecution and the court, and it operated. The Special Prosecution sought it, the special court authorised the searches and the seizures, and the sums generated by the sale, more than a hundred million euros sitting in a notary’s account, were frozen where they sat. The mechanism that the critics demanded of the wrong actor was exercised, in due form, by the right one. The freeze came when the law provides for it to come and through the channel the law provides.

Read what was seized, because it settles more than the placards will admit. The prosecution did not move against the land. It did not ask a court to undo the sale, to remove the buyer, or to strike the new entry from the register. It froze the money, and only the money. That choice is not housekeeping. It is the legal shape of the whole case. The decision to seize the price rather than the parcel is strong evidence of how the prosecution itself reads the situation: that the parcel has passed, that the asset now in dispute is the cash, and that the question left to decide is who may keep it.

This is where a point smothered under the noise has to be stated plainly. The buyer dealt with a registered owner who held a recent judgment in his favour, and relied on the public register, which the law does not merely permit a purchaser to do but expects of him. Good faith, in Albanian law as in the civil law tradition generally, is presumed; bad faith is what must be proven, and no one has alleged, still less shown, that the investors who put up the capital and acquired the land knew of or shared in any defect in the seller’s title. As a general principle of the civil law tradition, and subject to the specific rules of restitution and registration that the Albanian courts will apply, a purchaser who takes immovable property for value, in good faith, on the strength of the register is protected, and the wronged claimant’s remedy is then not to hunt the property into the new owner’s hands but to recover its value from the person who should never have sold it. That is the exact architecture the seizure has built. For the moment, the land remains with those who bought it. The proceeds are held while the courts decide whose they are.

So the real question, once the noise is cleared, is narrow, and it does not reach the investor at all. It is whether Artur Shehu was entitled to the share of the price paid for his parcels, or whether that money belongs, in whole or in part, to the villagers and other claimants who say the land was taken from them in the first place. That is a contest among sellers and claimants over a sum now frozen in a notary’s account. The buyer is not a party to the alleged wrong, not a suspect in it, and not a defendant. No guilt has been attributed to the investors, and none should be, not then and not now. To pull the purchaser into the moral weather of a laundering case, when all the purchaser did was buy registered land from its registered owner and pay for it, is to manufacture a culpability the file does not contain.

This reframes the central accusation into what it actually is. The demand that the government should have stopped the sale is, in law, a demand that the executive should have done the court’s work without the court, on its own authority, against a registered owner, before any final ruling. It is a demand for the very lawlessness that the case is supposed to be about. The prime minister’s own formulation on this narrow point, that the property belongs to those who bought it on legitimate cadastral titles and that the investigation of the sellers runs on a separate track, is, as a statement about the limits of executive power over a private deed, legally correct. Whether it is sufficient as an answer to every other question raised by Zvërnec is not the subject of this column, and it should not be smuggled in here to manufacture a verdict the law does not support.

Two cautions hold the piece honest. The criminal characterisation of the sellers remains an allegation. Arrest measures and seizures are not convictions, and Artur Shehu and those named with him retain the presumption of innocence until a court rules. And the validity of the original restitution title, the question that governs who is entitled to the frozen proceeds, remains sub judice, undecided, the property of the courts and not of the executive or the press.

The legal position follows, as an observation and not a charge. On the land question, the government did nothing about the deed because the law gave it nothing lawful to do. Those who fault the executive for that inaction are faulting it for respecting the boundary between an administration and a court. The deed carried no suspension. Until one was issued, by the only authority entitled to issue it, the state’s correct posture was the one it held: to stay out of a transfer it had no power to forbid, and to let the prosecution and the courts do the work that is theirs alone. The buyers are owners, not offenders. What the seizure holds in suspense is not their title but the question of who, among those who claimed the land, may keep what it sold for.

Renada Bici is a contributor to the Tirana Examiner Legal Desk.