A luxury resort planned by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner faces a new challenge from villagers who say their land was wrongfully sold by an accused gangster.
The president’s daughter and her husband plan to develop a $1.4 billion resort on the uninhabited island of Sazan in Albania, as well as a wider hotel development along the Zvërnec coastline worth around $4.7 billion. Weeks of protests have raised concerns that the wildlife-rich area, with its flamingos and sea turtles, could be at risk from the project.
Adding to the controversy is the revelation from Reuters that some of the land earmarked for the project is at the center of a tense legal dispute over ownership. A dozen residents of the village of Zvërnec have alleged that their land was wrongfully sold for development since 2024, the year Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, struck a deal to proceed with the project.
“I was a small boy when I put my feet in that water. Now I am an old man, and they say I cannot,” Kostaq Konomi, 81, told Reuters, saying he had tried to access his seafront land last month but was met by a barbed-wire fence and men in black uniforms who refused him entry.
Konomi is one of a dozen residents planning to seek a court order to halt the project, their lawyer, Kostandin Beko, told Reuters. The residents he represents were declared the rightful owners of the land by an Albanian court back in 2013, he said, but the matter has remained unresolved because that ruling was appealed by the man who has since sold the property.
That man, Artur Shehu, is a Miami resident who has claimed his family’s ownership of the land dates back to the Ottoman Empire. Shehu, who fled Albania in 1999 and now reportedly resides in a Florida mansion, has been investigated in Italy for allegedly doing business in his homeland on behalf of Italian mobsters, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
Albanian media reported Friday that Shehu is now also under scrutiny by anti-corruption prosecutors there probing large-scale money laundering. He has continued to do business in the country after receiving asylum in the U.S. decades ago.
Italian prosecutors are said to have also suspected him at one point of drug trafficking, though he has never been charged with a crime, as authorities in Italy said they did not have sufficient evidence. A close associate of his, however, was charged and convicted in 2018 of forging documents to steal land.
Dritan Zagani, the former head of an anti-narcotics unit in Shehu’s hometown of Vlora, said Shehu had been suspected of involvement with a crime syndicate when gang members stormed into his bar in 1999 and killed two people. Shehu fled the country before investigators could question him about the shooting and his involvement with the organized crime group, Zagani told OCCRP.
Shehu appeared on an Albanian TV show last week and insisted that his claim to the land at the center of the latest controversy was “undisputed.” He had sold the land to investors through a middleman, he said, and didn’t know who had ultimately purchased it.
Neither Kushner nor Ivanka Trump have been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with the land dispute.
The Albanian government has said the land earmarked for the project is privately owned.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the villagers’ ownership claims, though they presented tax records and property deeds as evidence. Still, the allegations add to rising tensions in Albania over Kushner and Trump’s project.
Over the past few weeks, protests have erupted in Albania, some of them violent, The New York Times reported, as thousands have taken to the streets, blowing whistles and holding up cardboard cutouts of flamingos, a species that could be threatened by the luxury resort.
The ongoing protests have prompted Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama to defend the plans, saying the media has exaggerated the scale of the demonstrations and noting that the project has not yet received a building permit and construction has not begun.
However, conservation groups and opposition leaders have raised concerns about a lack of transparency and alleged political influence surrounding the project, with many calling for permits to be made public and urging lawmakers to step in to protect the wild coastline.
“People with land there, or who work on land there, suddenly couldn’t get to it,” Aleksandr Trajce, executive director of the country’s leading conservation group, told The Guardian, echoing concerns raised by Konomi that concrete fences topped with barbed wire are being erected near the Zvërnec site.
“It’s gone beyond being an environmental issue now. It’s a citizen thing. It’s much bigger,” he added.
Yet neither Ivanka Trump nor her husband has responded to Albanian citizens’ concerns, with the president’s daughter appearing detached from the turmoil as she spoke on a podcast about the “restraint and care” she and her husband have put into developing the island of Sazan, which they first came across while stopping for a swim “on a friend’s boat.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Affinity Partners for comment.
