Date: 19th of May 2026 | 2:00 p.m. | P10
Invited Speaker: Manjola Naço, Canadian Institute of Technology, Tirana, Albania
Prof. As. Manjola Naço is a distinguished Albanian scholar and public finance expert with over three decades of experience spanning cost and management accounting, forensic accounting, and public sector audit. She currently serves as Dean and Lecturer at the Canadian Institute of Technology in Tirana, where she leads academic development alongside her teaching responsibilities. Prior to this role, she held a long-tenured position as Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics, University of Tirana, one of Albania’s most prominent public universities, where she shaped successive generations of economists and finance professionals. She also served as Director General at Albania’s Supreme State Audit Institution, the country’s highest independent external audit body, where she led efforts to advance transparency and accountability in public financial management at the national level.
Her scholarly and professional expertise encompasses public finance, risk-based auditing, data analytics in audit processes, forensic accounting, and the strengthening of internal control systems across the public sector.
This workshop equips master’s students with the analytical tools to read a public-private concession contract as a risk governance instrument, rather than merely as a legal document. Using the December 2015 concession agreement between the Ministry of Health of Albania and SANISERVICE Sh.p.k. as the central case study, students will examine how a long-term public health service concession allocates, prices, transfers, or leaves unaddressed key fiscal, legal, operational, and public health risks. The focus is not only on what the contract explicitly states but also on what it omits, where it is ambiguous, and how those silences shape the real distribution of risk between the state and the private operator.
The SANISERVICE agreement offers an important case because it delegates critical clinical infrastructure sterilisation services, sterile surgical instrument supply, biological risk management, and surgical theatre disinfection to a private concessionaire across Albania’s public hospital system. This makes the contract more than a procurement arrangement: it becomes a framework for governing public value, fiscal exposure, service quality, and patient safety. Throughout the workshop, students will apply modern risk management frameworks to assess whether the contract protects the public interest, merely documents formal obligations, or exposes the state to risks that remain insufficiently governed.
Topic 1: Risk, Public Value, and Modern Risk Governance Frameworks
The first part of the workshop introduces the conceptual foundations of risk analysis in public-private concessions. Drawing on COSO Enterprise Risk Management 2017, ISO 31000:2018, and the IMF Fiscal Risk Framework, students will explore the distinction between risk and uncertainty, the classification of transferred, preserved, and neglected risks, and the role of contingent liabilities in public finance. Special attention will be given to the COSO ERM model as a tool for linking risk management to strategy, performance, governance, and public value creation.
Topic 2: The Contract as a Risk Allocation
The second part of the workshop applies these frameworks directly to the SANISERVICE concession agreement. Students will analyse how the contract allocates financial, operational, legal, and public health risks through its pricing structure, Pay × Use payment mechanism, service quality provisions, reporting rules, and enforcement architecture. Particular focus will be placed on the five-tier pricing model, the 171% price differential between surgical complexity classes, the absence of independent classification verification, the passive approval of monthly service reports, missing graduated penalties, absent step-in rights, and the limitations of the Cost-Benefit Analysis, Value for Money assessment, and Public Sector Comparator.
FREE PARTICIPATION
