For generations, the families of Zvërnec have grazed cattle and tended olive groves on a thin finger of land between the Narta Lagoon and the Adriatic, where flamingos gather each summer. This year, a concrete fence topped with barbed wire went up around much of it, cutting villagers off from their fields and from the sea.
The fence marks the site of a luxury resort linked to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the son-in-law and daughter of President Trump. It is the mainland half of a two-part venture that also includes Sazan, Albania’s largest island, where a company tied to Mr. Kushner plans a resort valued at roughly €1.4 billion, or about $1.4 billion.
A fast track timed to power. The path was cleared with remarkable speed. In early 2024, Albania’s Parliament loosened its protected-areas law in a way that opened the door to five-star development; within weeks, Mr. Kushner unveiled sketches for Sazan and Zvërnec on social media. On Dec. 30, 2024 — three weeks before his father-in-law’s second inauguration — a committee led by Prime Minister Edi Rama granted “strategic investor” status to Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC for the Sazan project. Months later, days after the couple visited Vlorë, the government created a state company to take a stake in it.
Mr. Kushner built his investment firm, Affinity Partners, after leaving the White House, with $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. He has insisted that nobody is handing him deals. But in a region where leaders openly compete for the president’s favor, the overlap between family business and American power is difficult to ignore. Mr. Rama, for his part, has said Albania needs luxury tourism “like a desert needs water.”
The ownership structure has grown harder to trace as scrutiny has grown. Questions are now routed to Sazan Real Estate Development, a Qatar-based entity led by Asher Abehsera, a longtime Kushner business partner, whose spokesman has said Mr. Kushner is investing in a personal capacity rather than through Affinity. A separate offshore company, Zvërnec South Adriatic Development, has signed agreements with people claiming ownership of some 650 acres (251 hectares) in Zvërnec and Narta, according to the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.
Villagers say much of that land was never the seller’s to sell. Their claim dates to the 1990s, when Albania returned farmland to residents after communism; they have shown reporters deeds and tax records from that era. Since 2006 they have fought Artur Shehu, a Vlorë-born businessman living in Florida, who claims the same pastures and coast. An Albanian court ruled for the villagers in 2013, but Mr. Shehu appealed, and the case has never been resolved. He then agreed to sell land to a development company anyway. The day after one such deal, Ms. Trump praised the site’s white-sand beaches on a podcast.
“No one mentions that people live here,” said Kostaq Konomi, the village head, who learned from the news that his land had become a resort. The families’ lawyer has said they would seek a court order to halt construction. Many residents belong to the area’s Greek-speaking minority and fear losing ancestral land outright.
Prosecutors are now examining the property’s ownership history and allege that Mr. Shehu and associates were involved in money laundering and drug trafficking, which he denies. About €105 million that a Kushner-backed group paid for the land has been frozen in a notary account. Albania’s anti-corruption prosecutor has also opened an inquiry into the 2024 changes to the area’s protected status. No wrongdoing has been alleged against Mr. Kushner or Ms. Trump, and Reuters found no evidence he was directly involved in the land dispute.
The fence set off what Albanians call the “Flamingo Revolution”: by mid-July, protesters had marched in Tirana for 42 consecutive nights, demanding the project’s cancellation and Mr. Rama’s resignation. The European Union warned that the development could jeopardize Albania’s accession benchmarks. Conservationists note that the Vjosa-Narta lagoon shelters more than 250 bird species, along with seals and nesting sea turtles.
Mr. Rama says the state owns no land at Zvërnec and that his government is not involved there. That is precisely the villagers’ complaint: a project bearing the most powerful family name on earth advanced through a fog of private claims, offshore companies and personal-capacity investments — while the people who have farmed the land for centuries were the last to know. Mr. Kushner did not respond to requests for comment through Affinity Partners.
"We learned about it from the news" is the sentence no development wants attached to it.