The Phantom Pillar

Albania does not run on drug money, and its prosecutors never behaved as if it did. The dependency myth survives anyway, because it has customers, and some of them are hostile.

By Bekim Besimi (Venice)

There is a sentence about Albania that circulates in London tabloids, in Rome courtrooms, in Brussels corridors, and in Tirana cafés, always with the confidence of the self-evident: the economy runs on drug money. The towers are cocaine. The coast is cocaine. The strong lek is cocaine. Take away the flow and the whole edifice comes down, which is why, the knowing shrug concludes, nobody will ever really take it away.

Every part of that sentence deserves examination, because it contains one truth and one myth fused so tightly that most people can no longer see the seam. The truth is that Albanian organized crime earns enormous money abroad and launders a serious share of it at home; the prosecution files of the last year alone have put that beyond argument. The myth is dependence: the idea that this money is a load-bearing pillar of the national economy, without which growth stops, the currency collapses, and the lights go out. The truth demands confiscation. The myth quietly argues against it. And the myth does not survive arithmetic.

What dependence would mean
Dependence is a testable claim, not a mood. An economy depends on an inflow when the inflow is large relative to the whole, when it finances activity that could not otherwise be financed, and when its removal would cause contraction that the system cannot absorb. Gulf states depend on hydrocarbons in this sense. Moldova, for a period, depended on remittances. The question for Albania is whether criminal proceeds pass any of the three tests. So the first task is to measure the pillar, and the second is to measure the building.

The building
Start with what verifiably carries the Albanian economy, because the numbers are public and large. The Bank of Albania’s balance of payments records show foreign visitors bringing 5.7 billion euros into the country in 2025, a net contribution of roughly 2.7 billion after Albanians’ own travel abroad, in a year when arrivals passed eleven million. Tourism receipts have climbed from about 12.5 percent of GDP in 2021 to roughly a fifth today.

The rest of the ledger is just as documented. Emigrants sent home more than 1.1 billion euros. Foreign direct investment reached 1.6 billion by the central bank’s count, with energy, banking, and real estate the leading destinations. Services exports have become the country’s structural earner in a way no illicit flow had to arrange. Add a state whose finance ministry reports a fiscal surplus, and a central bank that has accumulated billions of euros of reserves, much of it purchased in the domestic market precisely because legal inflows kept arriving faster than the economy could absorb them.

That is the building: roughly seven to eight billion euros a year in documented, sourced, taxable foreign currency entering a thirty-billion-euro economy. Whatever else Albania is, it is no longer a country whose external accounts need a criminal explanation.

The pillar
Now the pillar. Criminal proceeds resist measurement by design, but the files provide floors, and the floors are the largest numbers anyone has. The most productive network yet prosecuted is estimated to have grossed on the order of a billion euros across roughly fifteen months of peak operation, of which prosecutors traced about 150 million euros into Albanian assets. Five years of confiscation activity across all organized crime cases has seized or frozen assets in the low hundreds of millions. Suppose, generously, that the traced amounts are a fraction of the real flow, and that several networks of comparable scale operate simultaneously. One still struggles to construct an annual laundered inflow into Albania above the high hundreds of millions, and most attempts land lower.

Two corrections shrink the pillar further, and both are routinely skipped. First, the headline fortunes are earned abroad. A billion euros grossed between Rotterdam and Milan is not Albanian income; only the portion repatriated for laundering touches the Albanian economy at all, and launderers diversify across London, Dubai, and the Emirates precisely because concentrating at home is bad tradecraft. Second, of the portion that does come home, a meaningful share buys euro-denominated property in euro cash and never enters the lek economy or the measured circuit; it changes the ownership of existing assets without financing new activity. What remains, the money that actually builds and spends inside Albania, is real, corrosive, and worth prosecuting. Put a number on the generosity: assume an annual laundered inflow of 700 million euros, well above anything the files support, and it amounts to between 2 and 3 percent of GDP, set against more than seven billion in documented legal inflows.

Pillars are not made of single digits.

The removal test
The strongest version of the dependency claim is a prophecy: cut the flow and watch the crash. It is worth walking through what would actually happen, sector by sector, because the exercise is clarifying.

The currency stops appreciating, or weakens somewhat. For exporters, farmers, and the garment workshops that have spent four years being strangled by a strong lek, this is not a crisis but a reprieve; the tradable economy has been the appreciation’s victim, not its beneficiary. Real estate cools. Prices that have outrun every measure of domestic income stop outrunning them, to the advantage of every household still trying to buy and the disadvantage of a narrow class of holders. Construction contracts at the margin, and construction is a large employer, so the transition has real costs; but the sector’s financing core is bank credit, which does not vanish, and the demand core is tourism and diaspora purchasing, which criminal proceeds did not create. The banking system’s exposure runs through real estate collateral, and a cooling there deserves supervision, which is an argument for managed enforcement rather than for none. And standing behind the whole scenario is a central bank holding the very euros it spent years buying to slow the lek’s rise, an instrument acquired, with unintended irony, as a byproduct of abundance rather than scarcity.

A country dependent on an inflow cannot tell this story about its removal. Albania can. The honest summary of the removal test is not collapse but rebalancing, with identifiable losers concentrated among asset holders and identifiable winners spread across producers and buyers. That distribution of pain is roughly the opposite of what a narco-dependent economy would exhibit.

Why the myth thrives anyway
If the arithmetic is this lopsided, the myth’s persistence needs its own explanation, and it has three.

The first is visibility. Criminal wealth is architectural: it stands twenty stories tall on the boulevard, drives a specific kind of vehicle, and photographs beautifully. Tourism receipts are the opposite; five point seven billion euros arrives as a hundred million card payments and cash tips dispersed across guesthouses and beach restaurants from Theth to Ksamil, visible to no one as a mass. The eye finds the tower and misses the inflow thirty times its size, and folk macroeconomics is built by the eye.

The second is demand. The myth has customers everywhere. Abroad, a narco-state narrative sells papers and, for accession skeptics, usefully converts Albania’s visible progress into evidence against it, since prosperity itself becomes suspect. At home, the myth serves anyone who needs the last decade’s growth to be illegitimate. It even serves the launderers, and this is the perverse part, because a criminal class believed to be indispensable is a criminal class insured against expropriation.

The third has to be laid at the state’s door, because the myth’s best fertilizer is official opacity. The data that would size the phenomenon honestly exist or could exist: the cash share of property transactions, the financial intelligence unit’s typologies and volumes, net errors and omissions in the external accounts, construction financing sources. Little of it is published in usable form, and ministers asked about laundering in construction have tended to answer a different, easier question about aggregate bank credit. A government confident of the arithmetic would publish the arithmetic. Each year it does not, the void is filled by the tallest building anyone can see, and the myth compounds. Skeptics of the government will note, fairly, that opacity is not the behavior of an administration eager to have the question settled.

Organically grown, strategically harvested
There is a fourth dimension, and it deserves plain language. The dependency myth is not merely repeated; it is deployed. The information ecosystems that work to keep the Western Balkans out of Europe discovered the narco-state label long ago and have run it against Albania and Kosovo with industrial regularity, because it is the rare trope that converts good news into bad: growth becomes laundering, enforcement becomes theater, accession becomes contamination risk. Tehran, whose hostility to Albania has been open state policy since the cyberattack that severed diplomatic relations in 2022, has found the same narrative serviceable, and operations amplifying Albanian domestic unrest have leaned on it. For these actors the myth is not an analysis but a payload. It requires no evidence, only repetition, and every unsourced “everyone knows” in a European newsroom does a shift of unpaid work for it.

Precision matters here, because the accusation is serious and the temptation to overextend it is real. The narrative was not invented by hostile services; it grew organically from tabloid crime copy, from real Italian and Dutch prosecutions of real Albanian defendants, from domestic political combat, and from the visibility problem described above. Foreign editors and honest critics who repeat it are not agents; they are, at worst, careless. The correct charge is not origination but harvest: adversaries found a myth already growing in open soil, fertilized by Albania’s own opacity, and industrialized it. Which points to the counter. A narrative that lives on the absence of numbers dies from their publication, and the actors who weaponize it are the largest beneficiaries of every year the Albanian state declines to put the arithmetic on the record.

What the money actually threatens
None of this is exoneration, and the point of shrinking the pillar is not comfort. It is aim. The real damage of criminal money in Albania was never macroeconomic, and treating it as a GDP question has misdirected a decade of argument. A few hundred million euros a year cannot move a thirty-billion-euro economy, but it can buy things no legitimate inflow competes for: police commanders, land registry officials, municipal councils, prosecutors’ files, votes in marginal districts. The purchase of a mid-level official costs five figures. The purchase of an election in a small municipality costs six. Against institutions, criminal money is not a single-digit fraction of anything; it is frequently the largest bidder in the room, and the files of the last decade, from the trafficking cases that reached ministers’ circles to the sanctioned politicians of Elbasan, document the market in operation.

That is the dependency Albania should fear: not an economy that cannot function without dirty money, which is fiction, but a state that cannot function around it, which is the documented risk. The inversion matters because the two diagnoses prescribe opposite treatments. The economic myth counsels hesitation, since amputating a pillar invites collapse. The institutional reality counsels speed, since every year of coexistence deepens the capture.

An insurance policy nobody in Tirana bought
Which returns to why the myth is worth killing rather than merely doubting. The single most effective argument available against aggressive confiscation, anywhere in the world, is that the economy could not take it; a criminal class believed to be indispensable holds an insurance policy written by public opinion. What the Albanian record shows is that the country’s prosecutors never purchased the policy. The billion-euro networks have been dismantled, the towers sequestered, the portfolios frozen, the cases carried to former ministers and serving officials, at a pace that reads as anything but hesitation. On the enforcement ledger, Albania has already answered the dependency myth in the only language that counts.

The myth’s remaining damage therefore lands elsewhere, and it is not small. It lands abroad, where a decade of prosecutions is discounted as performance because the underlying story says the state cannot afford to mean it. It lands on standing, where clean Albanian capital, diaspora savings, and honest exporters pay a narco-premium in every due diligence process that prices the country by its reputation rather than its accounts. And it lands on the accession file, where the trope does exactly the work its harvesters intend. The arithmetic says the insurance policy is void; the record says it was never honored; what remains is to stop letting the myth collect on it abroad. Albania’s economy is carried by tourists, emigrants, investors, and its own producers. It has proved it can afford the seizure of every criminally financed floor in Tirana, because it is already seizing them. What it cannot afford is a world that refuses to notice, and the fastest cure for that is the one instrument still unused: the published number.

Bekim Besimi writes from Venice, where he contributes to the Tirana Examiner with a focus on economic governance, public finance, and fiscal transparency in the Western Balkans.