Outraged Albanians are targeting the presidential son-in-law for pursuing a $4 billion luxury resort deal in a business climate rife with corruption and environmental neglect.
Protestors in Tirana, Albania seek to stop t a luxury resort development that presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner wants to streamline on environmentally sensitive land.(Olsi Shehu/Anadolu via Getty Images)
In late May, dozens of protestors gathered at a scenic lagoon outside the Albanian coastal city of Vlore on May 23 to oppose the development of a luxury resort by an international consortium led by Jared Kushner. The demonstration received scant attention from Albania’s media establishment, which is controlled by many of the same oligarchic forces that support the Kushner project.
But over the next two weeks, the public mood in Albania turned sharply against the resort, in addition to another Kushner-helmed development. The projects have reportedly amassed some $4 billion from global investors, including Kushner’s longstanding partners who run sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East. The developers of the Vlore resort sent a stark message by erecting a barbed-wire fence around the property and unleashing a retinue of private security guards to administer beatings to the next round of anti-development protestors in early June. These draconian measures reinforced the broader Albanian public’s impression that their country is becoming a plaything of privileged oligarchs; the protests continued to gain momentum, and built into a major political crisis by the end of last week, with thousands of people now turning out for near-daily protests.
The Albanian government, led by the semi-autocratic and pro-development Prime Minister Edi Rama, now faces a unique coalition of environmental activists, local residents claiming corrupt developers and government officials screwed them out of their property, and ordinary people concerned that Albania’s explosion of luxury development is linked to money laundering. Among other things, the mounting protests in Albania are demonstrating that the Trumpian model of oligarchic impunity is not only aging badly in America, but also proving to be an increasingly toxic export.
The complicated and messy scandal has galvanized antigovernment sentiment among Albanians, who have long endured rule at the best of powerful oligarchs and corrupt politicians with extensive ties to an Albanian organized crime diaspora. Rama’s Socialist Party and the opposition Democratic Party (with neither socialism nor democracy being anywhere close to either party’s actual governing agenda) often trade accusations of corruption that the Albanian people have credited—often with sound justification.
“It’s a political battle between two sets of criminals,” one local journalist remarked about the Albanian governing duopoly. “There’s no good guys here, so people accept the accusations are true and apply to both sides.”
Still, the disillusioned-to-cynical Albanian public seems to have found a new common enemy in Jared Kushner and his high-rolling investor consortium. The conflict harks back to 2024, when Rama unilaterally approved Kushner’s controversial development proposal for Sazan Island, a waterless rock covered in Cold War-era bunkers off the coast of Vlore—along with a smaller, but still disruptive project that would level a nearby coastal wetlands. Albanian environmental regulators were sidelined as Rama fast-tracked the deal. He was initially able to contain public discontent by touting the tourist revenues from the Kushner projects to one of the smallest and poorest countries in southern Europe—a pitch very much in line with Rama’s campaign to get Albania approved for European Union membership.
Sazan Island, about five square miles of rocky scrub an hour off the coast, historically has been a closed military zone—a monument to the paranoid, autocratic reign of Albania’s former communist dictator Enver Hoxha. The rocky outcropping had been heavily fortified with a welter of bunkers, minefields and artillery emplacements, all to fend off an impending invasion by an unlikely alliance of NATO, the USSR and neighboring Yugoslavia that never materialized.
After the Hoxha regime’s fall in 1991, Sazan remained empty, apart from the odd hiker or curious Italian tourist. The island has no water source, almost no beach, and a prohibition on camping because of forgotten minefields, long-abandoned stocks of rotting antique artillery shells, and a population of extremely poisonous vipers. With Vlore’s hospital more than an hour away by boat, a snakebite would prove fatal, so hikers are forced to leave at sunset. Albanians had long greeted any proposal to build a resort on Sazan as a punchline, insisting that there’s a reason it remained uninhabited over the past 6,000 years or so.
But that all changed in 2021, when Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump took a holiday yacht trip—accompanied by the banking heir Nathanial Rothschild, who introduced the pair to Rama. The power couple fell in love with Sazan and the neighboring Zvërnec peninsula on the mainland. Zvërnec, a more viable spot for a resort and home to marshlands, pristine beaches, monk seals, and about 70 species of endangered birds including flamingos. By 2024, Kusher’s investment fund Affinity Partners, backed by a trio of Qatari billionaires, had proposed a series of developments anchored by luxury hotels on Sazan and Zvërnec.
From there, Rama went into oligarch-appeasing overdrive—environmental impact be damned. As work on both developments proceeds, Albanians are becoming outraged over the thoughtless damage wrought on the country’s ecosystem. “A protected landscape of global importance is under attack, and people are demanding an end to the devastation,” said Anouk Puymartin, Head of Policy, BirdLife Europe and Central Asia. “Nature belongs to everyone, not a handful of investors. The horrendous situation in Vjosa–Narte shows why laws are crucial to protect both people and nature. But those protections mean little if governments fail to uphold them.”
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Rama had no doubt calculated that the Kushner projects would escape close attention because he’s already done so much to despoil the Albanian landscape. Since he came to power in 2013 after a popular stint as Tirana’s mayor, Rama has worked closely with real-estate developers across the country to approve a seemingly endless number of construction projects, including huge apartment towers sprouting across Tirana. These projects are adding tens of thousands of luxury apartment units to a city of a few hundred thousand people that continues to lose population each year to economic migration across the continent. Nobody thinks these apartments will be occupied.
Rama has remained defiant in support or the Kushner deal and other commercial development plans, even as thousands of protestors continue to camp out in front of his office every day for a week. “If it was not Jared, they would not give a shit about what is happening in Albania,” said Rama from an EU summit in neighboring Montenegro on Saturday.
He’s not wrong. Albania hardly commands the attention of the world media, while the exploits of Trump and his family are reliable sources of global news coverage. But Rama has also mishandled the government’s response to the protests, further inflaming grassroots opposition to the Kushner projects. He’s said that builders won’t be pouring concrete on the heads of flamingos—a botched attempt at humor that only underscores his administration’s profit-driven end runs around environmental regulation. He’s also promised to launch Albania into the “Champion’s League” of European tourism without addressing the open corruption and self-dealing that are fueling the protests. All the while, he’s failed to address what most Albanians and European regulators see as the elephant in the room: Albania’s growing prominence as a haven for organized crime in Europe.
Albania is a lovely, welcoming place for visitors and virtually free of street crime. Albanians follow strict codes of personal honor so stealing a mobile phone is unthinkable, lost wallets are returned with the money inside, laptops can be left in cafes unattended and muggings are unheard of. At the same time, however, the country’s tightly knit social ethos has proved hospitable to organized crime: the same sense of honor, combined with a strong network of family clans, a complete distrust of government authority, and close cultural and geographic proximity to southern Italy’s mafia heartland, has helped to foster prime conditions for mafia control. Over the past two decades, Albanian clans have taken over much of Europe’s cocaine trade, which has immersed an otherwise poor country in illegal, hard-to-spend cash. And the government isn’t about to spurn the economic benefits of this influx.
The luxury construction boom in Albania is a prime case in point. “It’s obviously money laundering by organized crime,” said my journalist colleague, who investigates crime and corruption. “They’ve got to turn cocaine money from the cartels working in the UK and northern Europe into assets.”
It’s all a recipe for corruption on a massive scale, as powerful business interests coordinate new development projects with the government, and the international mafia ecosystem. Kushner and his consortium of investors aren’t direct players in this system—but it’s unthinkable that his local business backers and government officials friendly to the projects aren’t involved.
This kind of corruption is simply priced into most major investment projects in Albania. Dozens of suits are wending their way through the courts alleging that land allotted for potential development was fraudulently seized by alliances of local officials and business concerns. These charges are part of a larger pattern of big-money players preying on Albania’s chaotic system of property ownership, which has yet to work through the fallout from mass communist-era land seizures. Prominent lawyer and developer Pellumb Petritaj, whose client base included several owners of disputed development parcels, was convicted of fraud in 2018 for forging property ownership documents in a welter of other real-estate deals.
Shefqet Kastrati, meanwhile, is perhaps Albania’s most powerful oligarch. He owns the international airport, most of the country’s gasoline stations, and has built much of the country’s infrastructure. Kastrati is reportedly a party in the Kushner deal, even though the exact nature of his alleged involvement has yet to come to light. Still, Kastrati’s son, Musa, was photographed standing next to Ivanka Trump at the press event announcing the project—suggesting that the inner workings of the Albanian oligarchy, like the American one, are very much a family affair.
Like their counterparts in the Rama government who counted on sneaking the developments by the public, the protestors have promoted opposition to the Kushner developments as part of a broader strategic assessment. Albania’s political and business class is too influential to be effectively challenged outright—so protestors have privately said that Kushner and his partners, a Qatari based consortium controlled by billionaire investor Moutaz Khayyat and his two brothers, are a prime target of opportunity, since they symbolize an ethos of reckless and self-interested exploitation all too familiar to the struggling Albanian population. “They’re easier to attack in public but the result is the same,” said one anti-corruption activist. “It’s hopeless to go after the government and mafia, but we can go after Trump’s son-in-law as a way to hurt [the local actors] and make some progress.”
Albania’s embattled but independent anti-corruption task force, known by its acronym SPAK, seems to be following the same logic as it seeks to quell concerns from the European Union about the role of moneyed influence in the country’s judiciary. On June 2, SPAK prosecutors announced the seizure of bank accounts and business records of Albania Land Development, a local company managed by a Netherlands shell company, pending an investigation into fraudulent property title and other unspecified concerns surrounding the Kushner deal. I tried to visit the offices of Albania Land Development last week, only to find them empty. But one key data point about the firm is resounding among the growing crowds of protestors in Albania: it turns out that its ultimate owner is Kushner’s Qatari crony Moutaz Khayyat.
Mitchell ProtheroMitchell Prothero has covered international crime, terrorism, intelligence and security issues from the Middle East and Europe for over two decades. Previously Iraq bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, he’s written about security and terrorism in Europe for BuzzFeed News and as a senior writer for Vice World News. He’s currently based in Tirana, Albania.