Samir Mane is deeply embedded in every corner of Albania’s economic landscape. His extensive network of companies dominates markets ranging from shopping malls and supermarkets to civil engineering, tourism, real estate, renewable energy, and even banking. He and his associates own 56 companies that cover nearly every economic sector in the country.

Mane also oversees a charity foundation and has been recognized for his “Special Civil Merits” in Albania and outside of his native country, he was awarded the “High Honor Decorate for Services to the Republic of Austria.”

Samir Mane built an economic empire in Albania—a country that, in 2022, ranked 127th out of 196 in the Global Corruption Index.
In just 20 years, Mane has transformed himself from an Albanian immigrant in Austria to perhaps the most economically powerful man in Albania.
Samir Mane’s holdings are worth 2 billion dollars, making him the wealthiest person in Albania yet he always appears in a laid-back style, typically seen in Lacoste t-shirts and black trousers. The only visible sign of his wealth in public is his Bentley, an elegant British-made automobile.
The Many Origins of Samir Mane’s Fortune
Samir Mane lives in a luxurious home, hidden from the public eye, in the gated and guarded Rolling Hills private neighborhood in Tirana—a community he developed himself. His villa, spanning about 3,000 square meters, is valued at 4.8 million euros, according to published reports in Albanian media.
Mane has never publicly given a consistent account of the source of his wealth. He often tells different stories.
In the early 2000s, Samir Mane stated that trading was in his blood and that he had started his business ventures before the fall of communism while still a mining student.
“In 1987, together with my two friends, I opened the first private shop in Albania, selling meatballs,” Mane said in a Top Albania Radio interview.
In a different interview , he claimed, “I was in the business of selling electronic watches, scarves, and jeans. I imported them from Durrës,” he said in a Top Albania Radio interview.
In 1992, he said he was a money changer.
“In Albania, I carried dollars and bought Greek drachmas. Then I sold them in Austria. On the first day, I earned 10 thousand dollars. I did this job three times a week, earning $30,000 a week since 1992,” Mane said in the same radio talk.
After the fall of the communist system and the opening of Albania’s borders in the early 1990s, Mane, then in his 20s, was one of the few who ventured outside. He traveled through Yugoslavia, which was beginning to disintegrate at the time.
He said he initially went to Belgrade, then to Austria, where he began his life as an immigrant. There, he began buying and selling electrical household appliances.
“I started by working as a translator for a few months, and then I began buying household electronics, though in small quantities,” Mane told Albanian television.
“In 1993, I opened a company in Vienna that is still there today.”
According to Mane’s statements in interviews, in 1994, he expanded his trade to Macedonia (North Macedonia from 2019), where he opened his first stores. He says he earned his first million at the age of 25 just by selling televisions. Despite his success in Austria and Macedonia, no one knew him in Albania.
With the approaching change in government in Albania and the Democratic Party’s rise to power in 2005, Mane was quick to recognize the value of lobbying on behalf of his businesses. He became one of the first clients of Argita Berisha, who was representing businesses with the government,, just months before her father, Sali Berisha, assumed office as Prime Minister of Albania, an office he held until 2013.
At the time, Argita ran a law firm, and Mane was her consulting client. His first significant reward was the attendance of the prime minister and his wife at one of Mane’s business promotion events.
With Berisha’s victory, Mane soon found himself aligned with Eduard Frangaj, one of the shareholders in TV company Klan, who had joined Berisha, opposing the other two shareholders who were supporters of Berisha’s political rival, Fatos Nano. These shareholders, Marcel Skendo and Zhilien Roshe, soon left Klan.
Mane also established connections with Miroslav Mišković, a Serbian billionaire and deputy of Slobodan Milošević, the former Serbian president, often referred to as the boss of the Serbian underground crime syndicate.

Mišković’s Delta Maxi has acquired Mane’s Euromax in August 2008.
Supermarkets
Samir Mane likes to be recognized as the pioneer of supermarket retailing in Albania. In 2005, he established the Euromax hypermarket chain and the Univers (QTU) shopping mall in central Tirana. The chain quickly spread across the entire country.
The first Euromax hypermarket opened in 2005 in QTU as a local brand of the Balfin Group. In 2008, the Serbian-owned Delta Maxi Group, belonging to Miroslav Mišković, bought 100% of the shares, Balfin documents show.
The company started having problems with its suppliers, and in 2011 Euromax was acquired by the Belgian group Delhaize after it bought Delta. According to Albanian tax reports from 2012, Euromax had an annual income of 38 million euros.
At the beginning of 2013, Balfin Group bought Euromax back from the Belgian company Delhaize. Delhaize had decided to withdraw from Albania.
Two months after this announcement, in March 2013, Balfin finalized the sale of the store chain (23 supermarkets) to the Marinopoulos Group (CMB Balkans). This company was previously present in Albania through the Carrefour supermarket in the TEG shopping center, also owned by Balfin. The value of the sale was not disclosed to the public.
In May 2015, Balfin Group announced that it had acquired the exclusive rights to Carrefour Albania and Mane managed to settle 70% of its outstanding obligations. After the ownership change, Carrefour rebranded to InterSpar, a company managed by Balfin's Almark.

The Chrome Business
Although Albania is considered one of the top countries in Europe for its chrome reserves, the utilization of this natural wealth has a history of unsuccessful concessions, lack of investments, and unorganized and unlicensed mining operations, often resulting in severe conflicts.
Albanian Chrome (sometimes referred to as Albchrome) is the largest company in Albania engaged in chrome extraction. exploitation. In 2001, Darfo, an Italian company, was awarded a 30-year concession for a significant portion of Albania's chrome reserves and ferrochrome production. This concession included the Bulqizë mine, the Burrel factory, and the Elbasan ferrochrome plant.
In 2007, the Austrian group Deco Metal entered Albanian Chrome after purchasing the concession rights from Darfo. The Italian company exited in 2013 following a series of union protests over low wages and poor working conditions. In January 2013, Balfin Group acquired 100% of the shares of Albanian Chrome.
In July 2016, the Parliament of Albania extended the concession period of the Bulqizë chromium mine to the private company ACR Holding, part of Balfin Group, for another 10 years.
The government of the Socialist Party justified this extension of the concession period until 2040 by citing the new investments that the concessionaire promised to make in Bulqizë.
However, between 2015 and 2020, news reports said that 27 miners died and dozens more were injured in various accidents at the mine. Protests by members of the Bulqizë Miners' Union and civil society activists followed. They accused Samir Mane of violating the miners' rights.
The miners and the union blamed the company Albchrome for the lack of workplace safety. In the same period, from 2017 to 2020, the company fired miners who were union members.
In December 2022, Balfin Group announced the sale of Albchrome to the Turkish mining company Yildirim International Mining Investments B.V. The sale and transfer of the concession were completed in 2021.

Tourist Resorts and Strategic Investments
On March 7, 2014, at the once untouched beach known among locals as Dhraleo, on the Ionian coast, the government approved a permit for the construction of the Green Coast tourist resort—a complex of villas and apartments spanning 185,000 square meters, funded by Balfin, according to Albanian government records for corporations.
In 2015, the tourist complex gained the status of a Strategic Investment in the field of tourism, providing the investor with legal protection from complaints from residents about who owned the land on which it is being built.
At the time the building permit was approved in 2014, the taking by the government of properties in the locality was under investigation by the Prosecutor's Office in Vlorë. The outcome of that investigation is not known to the public yet.
For the Green Coast project, the company Mane TCI, now owned by Balfin, raised two loans totaling 16 million euros from Raiffeisen Bank. For the Green Coast 2 project, financial reports submitted to the Albanian government by the company for the last three years showed that the company's capital exceeds the minimum required as a guarantee for the investment.
Mane TCI received the status of a strategic investor for the New Born project in the coastal area of Lalëz. In total, the reported investments of Mane TCI in these projects amount to 139.3 million euros.
But it’s not just politicians and wealthy individuals who buy his villas that know about billionaire Samir Mane. His luxury residence on the outskirts of Tirana is even featured in a fourth-grade history textbook, illustrating to children what modern villages in Albania look like today.
