Local landowners are questioning how Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were able to sew up development rights for two luxury hotels on hot coastal property.
Two luxury real estate projects in Albania proposed by the son-in-law of former President Donald Trump are stirring up lingering tensions in that country, with the Trump family facing accusations that land it hopes to develop has been improperly set aside for them.
The disputes relate to US$1 billion ($1.6b) worth of investments that Ivanka Trump, the former president’s oldest daughter, and her husband, Jared Kushner, are pursuing in Albania along the Mediterranean coast of this Southern European nation on land once controlled by a communist government.
Kushner announced plans to build an opulent hotel and beach villa complex on a stretch of the mainland where an Albanian family has farmed for generations. The family members say part of this property was corruptly seized from them after the end of communist rule in 1991.
“They are trying to take from us what is ours,” said Bledar Alexandros Konomi, who as a young boy used to help tend cattle on the land now proposed for Kushner’s hotel and whose claim is backed up by Albanian court records.
At the second site – a small, strategically located island called Sazan where the Soviet Union sent military supplies during the Cold War – Kushner is working with top government officials in Albania to secure exclusive development rights.
What has not been public is that there is a second proposal to redevelop the same island submitted by an Albanian American real estate executive developer from New York, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
The developer, Evi Kokalari-Angelakis, said in an interview that the Albanian government has effectively ignored her proposal to rebuild the site because it wants to impress Donald Trump, in case he is reelected and can help Albania with its foreign policy goals.
“My biggest disadvantage is that I am up against Trump’s daughter and son-in-law,” Kokalari-Angelakis said. She added that she agreed to speak with the Times about her hotel proposal only after Ivanka Trump asserted publicly in July that she and Kushner had already secured a deal to build on Sazan.
“They have closed the door in my face,” Kokalari-Angelakis said. “It is absolutely outrageous.”
Kokalari-Angelakis is not the only one raising questions about Kushner’s proposed projects in Albania. Agron Shehaj, an opposition party member of the Albanian Parliament, said the process of picking a developer for Sazan Island had been too opaque.
“Of course for Albania, which is a poor country, it is important to develop tourism,” Shehaj said in an interview. “But there has been a lack of transparency here, and it makes it look like this is a private deal that is in the political interest of the prime minister of Albania.”
Prime Minister Edi Rama of Albania, in a statement provided to the Times through a spokesperson, and Kushner, in an interview, both disputed any suggestion that the Albanian government was taking steps to benefit Kushner because of his relationship to Donald Trump.
“The fact that such a renowned American entrepreneur shows his interest on investing in Albania makes us very proud and happy,” the written statement from Rama’s spokesperson said. “It shows on another level to the US and the world that there is a new rising star in the beautiful Mediterranean world of tourism named Albania.”
The Albanian projects are not sponsored by the Trump Organisation, the real estate company owned in part directly by Donald Trump, and will not carry the Trump name or brand. Instead, Kushner, who served as a White House adviser to Trump, set up his own investment company, Affinity Partners, backed mostly with funding from the Government of Saudi Arabia, to do deals in locations around the world.
For these projects in Albania, as well as a separate deal in Serbia, Kushner has teamed up with Richard Grenell, who served as a special envoy to the Balkans during the Trump administration.
Kushner, in the interview, said his plans already had helped elevate Albania’s global profile as a Mediterranean tourist destination. “We want to make something that people can be very proud of,” he said.
Sazan, the largest island in Albania, sits at a strategic spot north of the border with Greece and just across from the heel of the boot of Italy. For nearly 1000 years, the largely uninhabited island has been a vital military site, at the narrow entrance to the Adriatic Sea, including being used by the Italians as a submarine base through World War II.
After Albania drew close to the Soviet Union, following World War II, the island became a military outpost for hundreds of Albanian soldiers as well as anti-aircraft batteries supplied by Russia.
The island today is still filled with bomb shelters, along with a small military port and a collection of rundown, mostly abandoned buildings, not far from where Kushner and Ivanka Trump want to build.
“If Soviet boasts can be believed, Saseno has been fortified so that it is impervious to atom-bomb attack,” said one CIA cable from 1951, which was based on Turkish news reports, adding that Sazan (Saseno was the Italian name for the island) was “in a position to block the Adriatic Sea completely, just as Gibraltar blocks the entrance to the Mediterranean”.
To get access to the island, Kushner’s firm needs approval by the Albanian Government. It has already submitted a proposal to the Albanian Investment Development Agency.
“We have this 1,400-acre island in the Mediterranean, and we’re bringing in the best architects and the best brands,” Ivanka Trump said during a podcast interview this summer.
She served as an executive at the Trump family hotel and golf company before her father was elected president, and this project is among the first that she has said she will play a direct role in since her father left the White House.
Asher Abehsera, an American real estate executive whom Kushner has appointed to oversee the projects, said the Albanian government gave preliminary approval to proceed with negotiations to build the hotel complex at Sazan, but the final terms of any deal are still unresolved.
But Ivanka Trump’s comments suggesting that her family had secured access to Sazan have drawn criticism in Albania.
Kokalari-Angelakis said she submitted a proposal in the spring – a copy of which was provided to the Times – offering to invest US$400 million ($645m) on Sazan to build a luxury hotel inspired by The Breakers resort in Florida. It would “attract a different kind of crowd, potentially the Elon Musks and the Jeff Bezos of the world, who are constantly cruising the Italian and the Greek coast, while sadly skipping Albania,” the proposal said.
Kokalari-Angelakis said she had had conversations with government officials about her plan, and had been asked by the Government to prepare a more detailed engineering proposal, only to hear Ivanka Trump’s comments during a podcast in July suggesting that the deal had been done. She said she had decided not to spend more money pursuing her project.
Executives at AIDA, the Albanian agency that oversees such projects, declined a request for an interview. In a written statement, the agency said plans to build on Sazan Island are still under review and “as long as we do not have any decision we do not have information to share”.
Kokalari-Angelakis once was a backer of Donald Trump, contributing to his 2020 reelection campaign and even playing a role in disputing the outcome of that election on his behalf. Now, however, she said she believed the Trumps had received special favours from Rama’s Government.
“The US would have a hard time taking action against Rama’s government while he is in partnership with Jared and Ivanka,” she said.
Rama’s spokesperson, in his statement, disputed this claim, calling it “quite amusing” given that Rama, who is a Socialist, has been accused of having close ties to the Soros family, which is associated with liberal groups.
“Edi Rama is the Prime Minister of Albania, and for him, whoever joins our efforts to serve Albania’s best interests is truly a great blessing,” the statement said.
Abehsera and Kushner, in separate interviews, said they were not asking for – or getting – any special treatment.
“We’re developing something that not only exemplifies excellence and quality, but also upholds the highest standards of compliance at every step,” Abehsera said.
The second proposed Kushner development site – where 1000 beach villas and hotel rooms are planned – is nearby in a community called Zvernec, adjacent to Vlorë, Albania’s third-largest city, where a new international airport is now under construction and tourism is already booming.
Much of the property near Vlorë was confiscated by the Government during the communist era, and disputes have dragged on since 1991, when the democratically elected Government began attempting to return property to the rightful owners.
The site Kushner and Ivanka Trump have identified for their Zvernec project is the subject of several of these disputes.
The records show large parts of the land now proposed for development by Kushner have been held by families that lived just to the south of the site, in the small village at Zvernec, where both Greek and Albanian are spoken and whose history can be traced back to the 6th century B.C.
But after the Albanian government started the process of returning seized land, a real estate developer named Artur Shehu, along with other members of his family, filed claims asserting ownership. Some of the claims filed by Shehu’s lawyer were later deemed to be fraudulent, records show, although certain rulings are still being appealed.
Shehu, who was granted asylum in the United States two decades ago and court records show lives in Miami, did not respond to a request for comment.
Villagers in Zvernec, including the Konomi family, have in recent weeks reached out to Kushner to notify him in writing of their claim that they own the land where the luxury hotel is slated to be built and that they are not necessarily ready to give it up.
“It is very obvious that a big corruption scheme is going on,” said Konomi, a professor of statistics at the University of Cincinnati whose family members still frequently visit a home they have in the area. “It is just unbelievable.”
Kushner has turned to one of Albania’s richest families – Shefqet Kastrati, a billionaire real estate developer and owner of Albania’s largest chain of gas stations – to help with the project in Zvernec.
Kastrati Group has long-standing ties to Rama, the Prime Minister. It controls several lucrative government contracts, including the international airport in Albania’s capital.
In interviews, executives at Kushner’s firm said they had been unaware of the land dispute.
“We are confident we are working with the rightful titleholders,” Abehsera said in a statement. “If proven otherwise, we will respectfully withdraw from the purchase.”
Albanian coastal land has been snapped up in recent years by other powerful, wealthy families, according to Neritan Sejamini, a former adviser to the office of the Prime Minister, who has studied how the 1991 law intended to return communist-era land has been exploited.
“The law has been abused to the benefit of the politically connected sometimes at the expense of local residents,” Sejamini said.
A separate law adopted earlier this year also allows luxury hotel projects to be built atop land set aside to protect sensitive wildlife and environmental areas, including Kushner’s planned site in Zvernec.
Thoma Kola, 81, who lives in Zvernec, said he feared his family might soon lose the land north of the village. “We won’t be able to leave it to our children,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Eric Lipton and Vladimir Karaj
Photographs by: Ilir Tsouko
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
