After completion of the interviews of the candidates for general director of Radio Television of Kosovo on Saturday, the acting director of RTK, Shkumbin Ahmetxhekaj, was ranked first after calculating the points of the written test and the interview.

Initially, eight candidates for the post of director general passed the written test and were invited to the final stage of the competition – the interview. 

But three candidates, Fisnik Dërguti, Hysen Hundozi and Fadil Hoxha, all withdrew from the competition after the list of the candidates’ scores for the written test was published. 

The list revealed surprising differences in scores given by board members for the same answers of the director candidates.

All three candidates described the competition as “prepared” and “orchestrated” and said the process should re-start from point zero. 

On Saturday, Fadil Hoxha, in a post on Facebook, wrote that if expertise suggested suspicions in the vote, he will send the case to the prosecutor’s office.

The list of evaluated candidates, published in writing following a request made by BIRN, reveals the points each candidate received from each member of the evaluation commission.

In some cases, one member of the evaluation commission gave a candidate 15 points, the maximum score, while another member of the commission gave zero points for the same answer.

BIRN requested access to documents on the points awarded by commission members for each candidate tested, as the RTK board does not publish the points awarded to each candidate separately by each commission member. 

On the day of the test, the evaluation commission announced only the total scores of the candidates.

BIRN’s request to see the full list of scores for each candidate by each member of the commission was based on best practice applied in job competitions monitoring assisted by British experts, in which candidates are transparently scored for the answers they give.

In addition to transparent evaluation, the British experts engaged by the British Embassy demanded clarification and justification of scoring from members of the evaluation committee, in cases where there was a great discrepancy in scores.

Following publication of the evaluation list, the Chairman of the Board of RTK, Besnik Boletini, on Friday complained of attempts to “tarnish” the work of the RTK Board through the evaluation process.

Boletini said that the written test for the director’s post contained 11 questions and, according to him, the difference in points between the members was simply because each member evaluated each candidate independently.

“Some of the members could have evaluated only the content, some also evaluated the spelling or ordering of the paragraphs,” Boletini wrote on Facebook.

According to him, even where the total points were the same for some candidates, the evaluation for each question was generally not the same. 

The RTK board announced a vacancy for general director in early February.

BIRN has been monitoring the process since the competition was announced. The FOL organization, media lawyer Flutura Kusari, three RTK unions and a European Union monitor are also monitoring the process.