FORMER ALBANIAN PRIME MINISTER FATOS NANO DIES AT 73
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Agency Report
Albania’s former prime minister and historic leader of the country’s left, Fatos Nano, has died at the age of 73, Prime Minister Edi Rama announced on Friday.
Nano passed away in a Tirana hospital after spending several days in a coma due to respiratory complications, doctors confirmed.
Widely recognised as a liberal reformer, Nano played a central role in modernising Albania’s institutions and steering the nation’s transition from communism to a market-based democracy following decades of authoritarian rule.
Born in Tirana in 1952, Nano began his career as an economic expert at the Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies during the regime of dictator Enver Hoxha, before becoming a professor of political economy at the University of Tirana.
He briefly served as prime minister in 1990 under Albania’s last communist president, Ramiz Alia, and later became the founding president of the Socialist Party (SP) the successor of the Communist Party of Labour after the country’s first multi-party elections in 1992.
Nano’s political career was marked by both reform and controversy. In 1994, he was convicted of embezzling $7 million in Italian aid funds and sentenced to 12 years in prison charges he denied, insisting he was a political prisoner.
During the violent unrest of 1997, sparked by the collapse of fraudulent pyramid schemes that devastated the country, Nano escaped from prison but was later granted amnesty by then-president Sali Berisha.
He returned to power as prime minister from 1997 to 1998, and again from 2002 to 2005, before the Socialist Party lost to Berisha’s Democratic Party in the 2005 elections.
Nano then retired from active politics, paving the way for Edi Rama now Albania’s current prime minister to assume leadership of the Socialist Party.
Though admired for his role in Albania’s democratic transition, Nano faced strong criticism from the European Union for failing to effectively combat corruption and organised crime during his tenure.
Tributes have poured in from across Albania’s political spectrum, with many remembering him as a transformational yet divisive figure in the country’s post-communist history.
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