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54-604: Mabetex Group is the mother company of several businesses found and owned by Behgjet Pacolli . The core company within the Mabetex Group is the civil engineering bureau Mabco Constructions SA , formerly known as Mabetex Project Engineering SA , located in Lugano. Mabetex specialises in large scale civil engineering which comprises construction and renovation of big buildings and building complexes. The Group has had many projects in former Soviet Union states. Other firms within

108-807: A foreign language correspondent and deputy director for development at the Textile Enterprise in Gjilan . He held this position until 1975 when he once again left Kosovo to move to the West to pursue career opportunities. From 1976 to 1980, Pacolli held important management positions in several companies, such as commercial director for regional development of the company Peter Zimmer in Kufstein, Austria, commercial director of Interplastica Project Engineering in Morbio Inf ., Switzerland , and afterwards he

162-552: A mandate for recognitions and for foreign investments, he led the lobbying campaign for the recognition and inclusion of Kosovo as a country in the international arena, holding meetings with more than 100 presidents, prime ministers, and kings from many different countries of the world. In February 2015, Albanian President Bujar Nishani awarded Pacolli the Nderi i Kombit (engl. Honor of the Nation) Award for his contribution to

216-585: A month negotiating on their behalf. Pacolli has been credited with securing their release. On 23 November 2004, the hostages were released. In his 2017 book "The Trade", Jere van Dyk describes that Pacolli paid a ransom to a Taliban tribal leader. In October 2006, the Italian photojournalist Gabriele Torsello was kidnapped in Afghanistan . Pacolli was contacted by an Italian intelligence agency in order to negotiate his liberation. Eventually, Pacolli

270-439: A parallel system. Đuro Daničić suggested in his Rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika ("Dictionary of Croatian or Serbian language") published in 1880 that Gaj's digraphs ⟨dž⟩ , ⟨dj⟩ , ⟨lj⟩ and ⟨nj⟩ should be replaced by single letters : ⟨ģ⟩ , ⟨đ⟩ , ⟨ļ⟩ and ⟨ń⟩ respectively. The original Gaj alphabet

324-453: A political party. In the 2007 elections, AKR became the third-strongest party by votes and led the parliamentary opposition in Kosovo, giving its contribution to the declaration of Kosovo's independence on February 17th, 2008 . During this period, although in opposition, Pacolli continued to work towards achieving international recognition of Kosovo's independence. Pacolli became a deputy in

378-417: A twelve-point plan for a large-scale renovation of Prishtina. Gaj%27s Latin alphabet Gaj's Latin alphabet ( Serbo-Croatian : Gajeva latinica / Гајева латиница , pronounced [ɡâːjěva latǐnitsa] ), also known as abeceda ( Serbian Cyrillic : абецеда , pronounced [abetsěːda] ) or gajica ( Serbian Cyrillic : гајица , pronounced [ɡǎjitsa] ),

432-479: A unified orthography for three Croat-populated kingdoms within the Austrian Empire at the time, namely Croatia , Dalmatia and Slavonia , and their three dialect groups, Kajkavian , Chakavian and Shtokavian , which historically utilized different spelling rules. A slightly modified version of it was later adopted as the formal Latin writing system for the unified Serbo-Croatian standard language per

486-516: Is inconsistent with the draughters of Kosovo's constitution. Ultimately, Pacolli's case helped improve Kosovo's score for Judicial Framework and Independence in the 2012 Nations in Transit report. After his withdrawal from the president's office, Pacolli decided to continue the co-governance and took on the role of the first deputy prime minister of the Republic of Kosovo . During this time, with

540-847: Is necessary (or followed by a short schwa, e.g. /ʃə/).: In the 1990s, there was a general confusion about the proper character encoding to use to write text in Latin Croatian on computers. The preferred character encoding for Croatian today is either the ISO 8859-2 , or the Unicode encoding UTF-8 (with two bytes or 16 bits necessary to use the letters with diacritics). However, as of 2010 , one can still find programs as well as databases that use CP1250 , CP852 or even CROSCII. Digraphs ⟨dž⟩ , ⟨lj⟩ and ⟨nj⟩ in their upper case, title case and lower case forms have dedicated Unicode code points as shown in

594-575: Is the form of the Latin script used for writing Serbo-Croatian and all of its standard varieties : Bosnian , Croatian , Montenegrin , and Serbian . The alphabet was initially devised by Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in 1835 during the Illyrian movement in ethnically Croatian parts of the Austrian Empire . It was largely based on Jan Hus 's Czech alphabet and was meant to serve as

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648-661: The La Fenice theatre in Venice after it was burnt. In Tashkent , the capital of Uzbekistan , the group constructed the project for the City Hall. Behgjet Pacolli Behgjet Isa Pacolli ( Gheg Albanian: [bɛhˈɟɛt paˈtsoɫi] ; Serbo-Croatian Latin : Behđet Isa Pacoli ; (born 30 August 1951) is a Kosovar Albanian politician and businessman who served as the first deputy prime minister of Kosovo and minister of foreign affairs from 2017 to 2019 under

702-633: The New Kosovo Alliance . He is believed to be the world's richest ethnic Albanian. Pacolli has also acted as a mediator in hostage recovery situations. Behgjet Pacolli is the son of Isa and Nazmije, the second of ten children. He completed his primary education in Marec and high school in Prishtina . He is Kosovo Albanian by ethnicity but has Swiss citizenship as well (which he received in 1992). After receiving his bachelor's degree from

756-496: The Ramush Haradinaj government. Pacolli is a former president of Kosovo , and served as the first deputy prime minister of Kosovo between 2011 and 2014. Pacolli was one of the signatories of the 2008 Kosovo declaration of independence . He is the major shareholder of Mabetex Group , a Swiss-based construction and civil engineering company. Pacolli is also the president of the third biggest political party in Kosovo,

810-864: The Slovene Lands since the 1830s: the traditional bohoričica , named after Adam Bohorič , who codified it; the dajnčica , named after Peter Dajnko ; and the metelčica , named after Franc Serafin Metelko . The Slovene version of Gaj's alphabet differs from the Serbo-Croatian one in several ways: As in Serbo-Croatian, Slovene orthography does not make use of diacritics to mark accent in words in regular writing, but headwords in dictionaries are given with them to account for homographs . For instance, letter ⟨e⟩ can be pronounced in four ways ( /eː/ , /ɛ/ , /ɛː/ and /ə/ ), and letter ⟨v⟩ in two ( [ʋ] and [w] , though

864-752: The Vienna Literary Agreement . It served as one of the official scripts in the unified South Slavic state of Yugoslavia alongside Vuk's Cyrillic alphabet . A slightly reduced version is used as the alphabet for Slovene , and a slightly expanded version is used for modern standard Montenegrin. A modified version is used for the romanization of Macedonian . It further influenced alphabets of Romani languages that are spoken in Southeast Europe , namely Vlax and Balkan Romani . The alphabet consists of thirty upper and lower case letters: Gaj's original alphabet contained

918-914: The Yeltsin era . The firm renovated the White House in Moscow , the State Duma Building , and the Kremlin . Pacolli was later accused of having bribed Yeltsin because he had guaranteed credit cards to the Yeltsin family. In early 1999, Swiss authorities opened an investigation and on 22 January 1999 searched the Mabetex office in Lugano, but the federal prosecutor's office dismissed the case against Pacolli in March 1999, as no incriminating evidence

972-862: The 22 letters that match the ISO basic Latin alphabet are concerned. The use of others is mostly limited to the context of linguistics, while in mathematics, ⟨j⟩ is commonly pronounced jot , as in the German of Germany . The missing four letters are pronounced as follows: ⟨q⟩ as ku , kju , or kve ; ⟨w⟩ as duplo v , duplo ve (standard in Serbia), or dvostruko ve (standard in Croatia) (rarely also dubl ve ); ⟨x⟩ as iks ; and ⟨y⟩ as ipsilon . Digraphs ⟨ dž ⟩ , ⟨ lj ⟩ and ⟨ nj ⟩ are considered to be single letters: The Serbo-Croatian Latin alphabet

1026-599: The Assembly of Kosovo and a member of the Committee for Budget and Finance. With Pacolli's rise in politics, he was seen as a great asset not only to Kosovo but to its development. On 22 February 2011, Pacolli was elected the 3rd president of the Republic of Kosovo . During the first days in his new role, he visited Mitrovica and crossed into Serb-majority North Kosovo to reaffirm Kosovo's authority and sovereignty in

1080-566: The Constitutional Court held Pacolli's election unconstitutional for two reasons. According to the Constitutional Court, a formal election requires two candidates who run for presidency, and that at least 80 deputies (two-thirds of 120 members) vote in favour of a candidate. Several dissenting members of the Court disagreed with the decision because it would allow a small minority of 41 deputies to prevent constitutional elections, which

1134-676: The Croatian-Slavonic orthography"), which was the first common Croatian orthography book. It was not the first ever Croatian orthography work, as it was preceded by works of Rajmund Đamanjić (1639), Ignjat Đurđević and Pavao Ritter Vitezović . Croats had previously used the Latin script, but some of the specific sounds were not uniformly represented. Versions of the Hungarian alphabet were most commonly used, but others were too, in an often confused, inconsistent fashion. Gaj followed

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1188-911: The Hamburg Institute of Foreign Trade in 1974, he completed his military service in the Yugoslav army, and soon after joined an Austrian company, for which he worked as a sales representative for ex-Yugoslavia, Bulgaria , Poland and Russia . Two years later, he moved to Switzerland and joined a Swiss company he had gotten to know in Moscow . Pacolli went to graduate school at the Mösinger Zurich Institute, where he received his master's degree in marketing and management. He speaks various foreign languages, including English , French , German , Italian , Russian , Spanish , and Serbian . In 1974, Pacolli started his career as

1242-661: The Holy See. Kosovar media reported that Pacolli and Pope Francis would discuss the peaceful coexistence between different communities and religions in Kosovo. Albanian news magazine Sot later wrote that Pacolli and Francis also talked about the Kosovo War . Pope Francis encouraged Masha Pacolli to continue working with women who were traumatized as a result of the armed conflict. On 26 November 2019, an earthquake struck Albania . As outgoing Kosovo Deputy Prime Minister, Pacolli and his family personally donated 1 million euros to

1296-422: The Mabetex Group specialise in insurance and public broadcasting. Mabco Constructions SA had, in 1997, an annual revenue of CHF 630 million; in 1996, the entire Mabetex Group grossed around CHF 1.5 billion. By 2016, the revenue had increased to around CHF 1.61 billion. In total, the Mabetex Group has about 14,000 employees, of which around 3,500 work in Kosovo. The company has more than 12 branch offices. Mabetex

1350-421: The alphabet are used to represent the equivalent Cyrillic letters. Also, Macedonian uses the letter dz , which is not part of the Serbo-Croatian phonemic inventory. As per the orthography, both lj and ĺ are accepted as romanisations of љ and both nj and ń for њ. For informal purposes, like texting, most Macedonian speakers will omit the diacritics or use a digraph- and trigraph-based system for ease as there

1404-561: The area. Pacolli went on two out-of-the-country visits as the president of Kosovo, visiting Albania and Macedonia . He left the role (though without formally resigning) on 4 April 2011, after the Constitutional Court of Kosovo had ruled that his election procedure had been irregular. Nicolas Mansfield, Director of Rule of Law programs for the East-West Management Institute (EWMI) explains that

1458-606: The building had been severely damaged in October 1993. Mabetex was asked to completely restore both the exterior and interior of the building. In total, Mabetex earnt USD 492 million for the renovation work. The renovation of the Kremlin alone cost USD 335 million. Mabetex has been working in Kazakhstan , where it played an important role in the construction of the capital Astana . The company has, as of 2009, built almost 40% of

1512-858: The buildings in Nur-Sultan, on more than 1,000,000 m of land. Among them were the new Ak Orda Presidential Palace , located on the left bank of the Ishim River , the ministry of foreign affairs, the concert and theatre hall, the Opera house , a hospital, the Saryarka Velotreck ice-hockey stadium, and the main terminal of the Nursultan Nazarbayev International Airport . Mabetex has been active in Switzerland since 1991. The group's first project

1566-409: The difference is not phonemic ). Also, it does not reflect consonant voicing assimilation: compare e.g. Slovene ⟨odpad⟩ and Serbo-Croatian ⟨otpad⟩ ('junkyard', 'waste'). Romanization of Macedonian is done according to Gaj's Latin alphabet with slight modification. Gaj's ć and đ are not used at all, with ḱ and ǵ introduced instead. The rest of the letters of

1620-548: The digraph ⟨dj⟩ , which Serbian linguist Đuro Daničić later replaced with the letter ⟨đ⟩ . The letters do not have names, and consonants are normally pronounced as such when spelling is necessary (or followed by a short schwa , e.g. /fə/ ). When clarity is needed, they are pronounced similar to the German alphabet : a, be, ce, če, će, de, dže, đe, e, ef, ge, ha, i, je, ka, el, elj, em, en, enj, o, pe, er, es, eš, te, u, ve, ze, že . These rules for pronunciation of individual letters are common as far as

1674-587: The early 2000s, Mabetex withdrew from the Russian market and has since been focussing mainly on the Kazakh construction market. In the early 1990s, the Mabetex Group began working in the Russian city of Yakutsk . From 1994 until 1998, Mabetex was commissioned to renovate the State Duma , Russian Opera House, Kremlin , and the White House in Moscow , the official home of the Russian government. Several floors of

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1728-526: The education of youth in elite schools, helps the poor, builds schools, and hospitals, supports sports, culture, etc. In 1993, Pacolli established "Les Enfants du Sakha", presently known as " Ibrahim Kodra Foundation " a fund with the stated goal of providing help in the medical care, education and recreation of children. Just in Kosovo, the Behgjet Pacolli Foundation has donated over 20 million euros to various projects. Pacolli has been

1782-457: The establishing of a Committee for Economic Cooperation with Slovenia at ministerial level. Pacolli supports establishing a peaceful economic relationship with Serbia. Serbian media reported that Pacolli is in favour of abolishing tax on goods from Serbia. From September 2017 to February 2020, Pacolli served as vice prime minister and foreign minister of the Republic of Kosovo . On 16 December 2019, Pacolli and his wife met with Pope Francis at

1836-567: The example of Pavao Ritter Vitezović and the Czech orthography , making one letter of the Latin script for each sound in the language. Following Vuk Karadžić 's reform of Cyrillic in the early nineteenth century, in the 1830s Ljudevit Gaj did the same for latinica , using the Czech system and producing a one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correlation between the Cyrillic and Latin orthographies, resulting in

1890-478: The few agents who successfully negotiate the release of hostages with terrorists. On 28 October 2004, after helping run a presidential election, the three United Nations workers Annette Flannigan, Angelito Nayan and Shqipe Hebibi, were taken hostage in Kabul . The latter of which originated from Kosovo and had neither representation nor support from other countries. Pacolli travelled to Afghanistan where he spent

1944-548: The livelihood in his homeland continued after the Kosovo War ended. In 2005 he created the lobbying company " The New Kosovo Alliance ", through which he lobbied exclusively for the creation of the country of Kosovo. During this time, Pacolli collaborated with many important figures in world politics, especially American leaders, such as Frank Carlucci , Morton Abramovitz , S. Waterman, Zbigniew Brzezinski , Janusz Bugajski , Henry Kissinger , and many others. For four years, he

1998-698: The main sponsor of the Aleksandër Moisiu Foundation, and the "Bambimi Di Sakha" Orphanages Foundation. Since 1993, Pacolli has been financially supporting the hospital for the shelter and care of abandoned children born with physical disabilities in Sakha Starting in 2006, Pacolli began donating for the construction and renovation of several buildings in Kosovo. First, the Parliament Building of Kosovo in Prishtina

2052-614: The new buildings in Nur-Sultan (former Astana). After the Kosovo War , Mabetex initiated a foundation for redevelopment of Kosovo in July 1999. Mabetex reconstructed buildings and schools that had been destroyed in the war. In 2002, Mabetex sent first aid goods to refugees camps in Albania , and helped other institutions in Italy and Switzerland to envoy goods using Mabetex's trucks. In

2106-726: The recognition of Kosovo's independence and to the economic relationship between Kosovo and Albania. The award ceremony took place at the Presidential Palace in Tirana. In late autumn of 2017, Pacolli discussed establishing Serb Municipalities for the Serb minority in Kosovo with foreign policy and security chief Federica Mogherini and EU enlargement commissioner Johannes Hahn . After meeting with Slovenian Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec in December 2017, Pacolli managed to negotiate

2160-545: The relief effort. On 15 January 2021, Pacolli visited the destroyed village of Thumana with Albania's Prime Minister Edi Rama . Pacolli announced that he would further support relief and build a housing complex that comprises 80 apartments with a square footage of 100 m each. Several times, Pacolli has been directly involved in the release of hostages in Afghanistan and in other countries undergoing conflicts. Assistant professor Dejan Lukić considers Pacolli to be one of

2214-424: The table below, However, these are included chiefly for backwards compatibility with legacy encodings which kept a one-to-one correspondence with Cyrillic; modern texts use a sequence of characters. Since the early 1840s, Gaj's alphabet was increasingly used for Slovene . In the beginning, it was most commonly used by Slovene authors who treated Slovene as a variant of Serbo-Croatian (such as Stanko Vraz ), but it

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2268-705: The time when US President Bush during his visit to Tirana in June 2007, stated, "Kosovo must be a country, an independent republic, now". Since Kosovo declared independence in February 2008, Pacolli has been working to convince other countries to officially recognize Kosovo as an independent country. Pacolli has been continuing his lobbying activities all around the world, where he has met senior leaders of world countries in an attempt to convince them to recognize Kosovo's independence. On 17 March 2006, The New Kosovo Alliance changed its function and transformed into

2322-469: Was also a member of the board of trustees of the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS) , in the Committee led by Henry Kissinger , during which time he continued his lobbying efforts towards creating the appropriate conditions for declaring Kosovo an independent country. The New Kosovo Alliance 's lobbying mission, was considered fulfilled by Pacolli and other members of the organization, at

2376-479: Was arrested by the Eritrean police on a mission to recognise Kosovo's independence. Eritrean authorities believed that Berisha was an American spy, and he was imprisoned for five months. Berisha was discharged from prison after Pacolli travelled to Eritrea and negotiated his discharge. Throughout his career in global business, Pacolli also developed philanthropic activities. His Behgjet Pacolli Foundation stimulates

2430-694: Was eventually revised, but only the digraph ⟨dj⟩ has been replaced with Daničić's ⟨đ⟩ , while ⟨dž⟩ , ⟨lj⟩ and ⟨nj⟩ have been kept. The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of Gaj's Latin alphabet, along with the equivalent forms in the Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic alphabet and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) value for each letter. The letters do not have names, and consonants are normally pronounced as such when spelling

2484-993: Was found, partially due to a lack of cooperation from the Russian investigation of Pavel Borodin , the former Head of the Presidential Property Management Department of the Russian Federation. At the end of the 1990s, during the Kosovo War , Pacolli organised humanitarian aid and donated money to relief. In 1999, he established the Foundation for the Organisation and Reconstruction of Kosovo (FORK) in Lugano. Later, Pacolli began business activities in Kazakhstan, where he worked with Mabetex in constructing new buildings in Astana . Pacolli's commitment to improving

2538-425: Was founded in 1991 in Lugano, Switzerland by Behgjet Pacolli, who has since been serving as the president of Mabetex Group. The company rose in size through contracting with the public sector in post-Soviet Russia throughout the 1990s. Mabetex's reputation as a "can-do" contractor solidified with the renovation of the Kremlin , which the company finished in 1996. Around that time, Mabetex also began constructing most of

2592-401: Was involved in the reconstruction of the Parliament building. The work carried out included the renovation of the interior and the reconstruction of the exterior with glass facades. In 2021, the group won an EUR 104 million tender for the construction of Albania's new international airport in Vlora . In Italy , the Mabetex Group was responsible in the study and project for the refurbishment of

2646-476: Was later accepted by a large spectrum of Slovene-writing authors. The breakthrough came in 1845, when the Slovene conservative leader Janez Bleiweis started using Gaj's script in his journal Kmetijske in rokodelske novice ("Agricultural and Artisan News"), which was read by a wide public in the countryside. By 1850, Gaj's alphabet (known as gajica in Slovene) became the only official Slovene alphabet , replacing three other writing systems that had circulated in

2700-408: Was mostly designed by Ljudevit Gaj , who modelled it after Czech (č, ž, š) and Polish (ć), and invented ⟨lj⟩ , ⟨nj⟩ and ⟨dž⟩ , according to similar solutions in Hungarian (ly, ny and dzs, although dž combinations exist also in Czech and Polish). In 1830 in Buda , he published the book Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja ("Brief basics of

2754-432: Was named general director at the same company (Interplastica). In the fall of 1990, he founded Mabetex Project Management , a construction company based in Lugano , Switzerland , which has developed into a large business group now called the Mabetex Group , with interests in construction, banking, insurance, hospital, media, design, etc. From 1992 until 1999, Pacolli's Mabetex worked on several projects in Russia during

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2808-466: Was renovated with Pacolli's help. Later, Pacolli funded the building of the American University in Kosovo campus. In 2008, he financed the reconstruction and restoration of the Mosque of Llap in Prishtina , a building which is enlisted as part of the cultural heritage of Kosovo. Pacolli financed the expansion and construction of the College of Philosophy within the University of Prishtina the next year. In 2017, Kosovar media reported that Pacolli proposed

2862-568: Was successful in negotiating Torsello's release, who was released on 3 November 2006 after 23 days in captivity. In 2007, Pacolli negotiated the release of 23 South Korean Christian missionaries from Afghanistan. He managed to secure the release of 21 of them after 2 were executed. On 19 July 2008, Swiss citizens Max Göldi and Rachid Hamdani were captured in Tripolis, Libya, and held as hostages. In early 2010, Pacolli negotiated with Muammar Ghaddafi and attempted to secure their release. On 15 August 2011, American-Kosovar Lobbyist James Berisha

2916-416: Was the Kazakh embassy building, located in a residential area of Geneva . The building houses several offices and conference rooms. Among other works, Mabetex has completed the Swiss Diamond Hotel, a luxury five-star hotel located in Lugano. Furthermore, Mabetex has reconstructed the five-star hotel Fluela in Davos, and the new Romantica Residence building complex in Melide-Lugano. The Mabetex Group in Kosovo

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