Your trusted source

Current government of Albania accuses its predecessors in signing of an agreement with Azerbaijan under the framework of TAP which is not enough beneficial for their country, as Independent Balkan News Agency reports.

According to the article, the project of Trans-Atlantic Pipeline (TAP) will become one of the largest investments projects of Albania for the last 23 years; the investments will at least equal to 1 billion EURO. However, now a question rises; what will the government of Albania do for gasification of the country? Some politicians are afraid that the country will only serve as a transit route to link other countries with TAP. “The problem is that Albania doesn’t have its own network of gas,” the article reads.

The PM of Albania, Edi Rama argues that the previous government of the country presided by Sali Berisha signed the most disadvantageous contract. According to his opinion Albania won’t get as much benefits from the project as the other participants will do.

On its turn, Berisha said that TAP is a transport system to deliver Caspian gas to Italy whereas gasification is a completely different process. “The country should create its own system of gas network, TAP doesn’t have anything to do with that,” he said.

According to him, he once addressed the Azerbaijani government for assistance with general plan for gasification of Albania, but he doesn’t know whether the current government continues those negotiations or not.

Besides, Edi Rama claimed that the previous government didn’t do anything to include Kosovo in TAP. Sali Berisha commented on this stating that because of Nagorno Kraabakh conflict Azerbaijan doesn’t recognize Kosovo and that’s why “Azerbaijan cannot include the country into the project, the independence of which it doesn’t recognize.”

Note that the project TAP aims to transport gas from Caspian region through Greece, Albania and across the Adriatic Sea to southern Italy and then to Western Europe. The initial capacity of TAP pipeline will be 10 billion cubic meters per year with the capacity to expand to 20 cubic meters. The shareholders of TAP are Swiss AXPO (42.5%), Norwegian Statoil (42.5%) and German E.ON Ruhrgas (15%). It is expected that the construction of TAP will start in 2015.