Two lawyers have been ordered into one month pre-trial detention by the Prishtina Basic Court over alleged involvement in a multimillion-euro land fraud scheme—, initially exposed by a KALLXO.com investigation in 2023—involving falsified documents, illegal land transfers, and fake court rulings.
Ramadan Dupoleva believed that he had legally bought land in the fast developing Veternik neighbourhood in Kosovo’s capital Prishtina, however, the property may have been illegally transferred to its previous owner.
“We’ve built five homes here. We’ve lived here for over a decade,” Dupoleva told Kallxo.com
“Let the courts decide, but I’m not going anywhere. They can make their deals, but this is our home,” he emphasised.
On June 13, 2025, the Prishtina Basic Court, ordered one-month pre-trial detention for two lawyers, Venhar Hana and Ditmir Islami, suspected of document forgery, fraud, and verification of falsified documents, relating to the alleged illegal land swap involving the property where Dupoleva and his family currently live.
The prosecution investigated an alleged illegal transfer of public land worth approximately 12 million euros in Prishtina’s Veternik neighbourhood, after a KALLXO.com October 2023, investigation exposed an orchestrated land grab.
In October 2023, KALLXO.com found that a falsified 1976 court decision, which had only surfaced in 2021, transferred state land belonging to the public broadcaster Radio Television of Prishtina, RTP, to a private citizen, Slavica Mikic without a verified document. With an estimated value of 12 million euros, the property has subsequently been sold in parcels to third parties.
According to the 1976 court verdict, the 3.92 hectares of state-owned land in what was then the Cagllavica cadastral zone—now the Veternik neighbourhood—were exchanged for two plots of land on a hill in the village of Cvilen, on the outskirts of Prizren.
The case proceeded in a legal vacuum because no one could verify the verdict’s origin, trace the court file, or locate any record of the transaction in the archives of the Prizren Cadastre. The registry of the State Archive, under renovation at the time, only has a vague entry relating to the case which is missing the actual verdict.
Falsified land ownership
The facility of the Municipality of Prishtina. Photo: BIRN
According to the prosecution’s case file, seen by Prishtina Insight, a person only identified as F.K., now deceased, allegedly persuaded Mikic to sign documents under the pretence that he was helping her fix a small house in Prishtina.
F.K., and later the lawyers Hana and Islami, used Mikic’s identity to obtain a falsified court verdict and file it with Kosovo’s Cadastral Agency, alleging she had inherited the property in Veternik through the court swap.
The Municipality of Prishtina rejected the application twice, citing the legal and territorial incompatibility of the verdict. But the Kosovo Cadastral Agency—acting as the appellate body—approved the registration in 2022.
Donat Lushaku, the then head of the Prishtina Cadastre Directorate, told KALLXO.com in 2023 that, “first time [we rejected it,] we believed that the 1976 court decision—referring to an exchanged property in Prizren—was missing both territorial and subject-matter jurisdiction for execution. The second time, the case file could not be located in the Inter-Municipal Archive of Prishtina.”
Mikic, represented by lawyers Hana and Islami, sold parcels of the land to private companies and individuals. Contracts were notarised. Property titles changed.
Prosecutors allege that some of the buyers were completely unaware that the land was obtained through fraud.
The group is believed to have netted at least 2 million euros in illicit profits from these transactions.
Institutional neglect
A pile of documents. Illustration: BIRN
The most concerning element of the case may not be the forged document but the institutional inaction that followed.
In July 2021, the Municipality of Prishtina alerted the Kosovo Privatisation Agency, KPA, that public land was at risk. The KPA confirmed that the property was under its management, but took no immediate steps to halt the transfer.
The KPA, meanwhile, approved the registration, citing its role as an appeals body and insisting that the municipal rejections did not prevent them from issuing a final decision.
In March 2023, nearly two years later, the KPA took legal action. By then, the land had been divided, sold, and partially developed.
In their legal challenge, the KPA is seeking annulment of the property transfers, arguing that the original verdict was falsified and that the registration process was based on “a non-existent legal title.”
KALLXO lifts the lid on the case
While institutions dragged their feet, KALLXO.com acted.
In an investigation aired on Kallxo Përnime TV Programme in October 2023, the Prizren Basic Court told reporters the case file never existed in the court’s archives. The cadastre said the documents had been lost in a fire in 2007.
The State Archive could not locate the verdict, only acknowledging a registry entry with an empty case number. The entry had arrived with an unusual annex, likely added afterwards.
After the KALLXO.com report, the Prosecutor’s Office started a criminal probe.
The KPA, has now filed a lawsuit to the Supreme Court asking for emergency injunctions to freeze the land, annul the contracts, and return ownership to the state.
English version prepared by Ardita Zeqiri