How would you like to have a job which pays you every month but does not require you to show up?! What about a job for which you do not even have to be in the country, but would still pay you a monthly salary which you could withdraw with your bank card?! What about a job for which you have to do nothing, but still get paid?!
Well, there was a news report recently about hundreds of unknown “Albpetrol” oil corporation employees who were now turning up on the job but did not know where to go or what to do because they had never worked a day for the corporation. Some of them lived abroad but would visit Albania every so often to withdraw their salary at the ATM, but would not show up at work. Most of them were not even qualified or knew anything about the position that they were supposedly hired for as their name was there just to get the money!
The recent appearance of so many of these aptly called “ATM employees” was for fear that they would lose their “ideal job” due to the recent political and government changes after general elections resulted in the Socialist Party & LSI becoming the new majority and the Democratic Party the new opposition after eight years in power.
This situation is a well-known, oft-repeated and much reported issue of abuses about how every successive Albanian government has used its power to employee its “militants” into state owned companies, where “Albpetrol” is one of the major ones due to its size.
During the past eight years, while the Democratic Party was in power, hundreds of its supporters all over Albania, where employed in government jobs, often replacing well-qualified personnel with semi-literate ones. The cases of Albpetrol, or KESH, or any other major state owned corporation represent vivid examples of how people’s names were entered into a company’s payroll, but many of them did not even show up to work, thus abusing the company’s finances and ultimately those of the state.
The new Socialist government is currently doing the same thing in its own way, while claiming to fix glaring abuses brought on during the years the Democrats were in power.
I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments…
