In Albania, anger grows against the government for supporting a Kushner-linked luxury resort

TIRANA, Albania — The way Ivanka Trump tells it, she and her husband Jared Kushner were vacationing on a friend's boat years ago on the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Albania when they stopped for a swim. "Effectively, that's how we found it," she told podcaster David Senra earlier this month about Sazan, an uninhabited island off Albania's Adriatic coast. "We swam to the island. We went on a hike barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated and it stayed with us ever since."

Over the ensuing years, the couple's captivating trip evolved into plans to build a luxury resort along a stretch of Albanian coastline directly across from the island. Albania's government has given the project preliminary approval, prompting daily protests outside Prime Minister Edi Rama's office in the capital Tirana.

Chanting "Edi Rama out!" thousands of people flooded the capital's streets on a recent day, calling on the prime minister to resign.

"It started with a national area being closed off to the public and having big lorries and trucks starting to build in a protected area," said protester Eden Hosha about Zvérnec, the coastal area across from the island. Hundreds of species of birds nest here in the winter.

But as these protests have grown bigger in recent days, they've become a public show of no-confidence in the Albanian government itself. "We're tired of these guys stealing from us," said Hosha. "Stealing our resources. Selling things that are not theirs to sell."

For decades, Sazan Island was used by Albania's then-ally the Soviet Union as a submarine base and testing grounds for biological and chemical weapons. Soviet-era masks still litter Sazan today.

The island sits across the sea from Zvérnec, a strip of beach and cliffs along Albania's Adriatic coastline that protects an inland lagoon. In the David Senra podcast that aired earlier this month, Ivanka Trump described both plots of land as belonging to her and Kushner. "Not only the island, but we have five miles of beachfront directly across from the island," she told Senra. "This beautiful peninsula with a lagoon on one side, the ocean on the other, and beautiful white sand beaches."

In an episode called "Ivanka Trump on Building the Authentic Life," Trump told Senra that over the course of many years, she and Kushner "developed the opportunity" to help realize the land's potential and transform it. "For me, this feels more like a challenge than anything else, the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live," she said.

But there are already tens of thousands who are living their lives on this land. Taulant Bino stands along a desolate dirt road surrounded on both sides by wetland. He holds a pair of binoculars to his eyes and calls out the names of these residents. "This is a black-winged stilt," says Bino. "And then you see common terns and little terns. There's a little egret. And then flamingos, I saw at least one but there should be more in the lagoon."

Bino is an ornithologist; he heads the Albanian Ornithological Society. He says this strip of coastal land is part of a protected ecological area called Vjose-Narte — it's a lagoon next to what he calls salinas, or salt flats — where glaringly white fields of salt sparkle like gemstones in the sunlight. "It's an incredible place," says Bino. "You have the salinas, which are really important for breeding birds, and also Narte Lagoon, which is really important for wintering birds."

Over the years, Bino and his colleagues have identified 250 bird species in the Narte Lagoon. He points across the water, where a construction company has built an access road into this protected area for bulldozers and equipment. "Birds are the first to suffer," he says with a frown. "Building an access road in the middle of the breeding season, for a lot of species, it's horrendous. It not only interrupts the breeding season, but it might crush also animals like amphibians and reptiles."

Ivanka Trump describes her and her husband's future development as one that shows restraint and care for this pristine environment. Bino sees it differently. "What we see from the project ideas, we see tall buildings," he says, "up to 10,000 rooms, so all of this is for a new city rather than an environmental project."

A group of environmental organizations have joined together to file legal challenges against Albania's government over the project. Dorian Matlija, their lawyer, says their case hinges on the fact the land this resort would be built on is protected under a range of international treaties, including the European Union's "Natura 2000," an ecological network of protected areas in the EU.

Albania, as an official candidate for EU membership, is subject to this network's rules, says Matlija.

"All of these say one thing: that you don't develop anything big," he explains. "You can only use the land or the area itself for agriculture, traditional agriculture, not intensive. You could also use it for fishing, but also traditional fishing, of course."

But in 2024, Prime Minister Rama ushered in a new law that stripped away Albania's protection of this ecosystem, allowing for the construction of five-star hotels on the land. Matlija says the legislation violates both Albanian and EU laws. "So this is also endangering our longtime dream [of] joining the EU as well," he adds. "So now there is this problem. So basically, if somebody will try to go to the court against that, they have high chance of winning and that's a big problem for the investors."

Another problem for the investors: On June 2, Albanian anti-corruption prosecutors froze the bank accounts of a firm that purchased land along this ecologically protected coastline. It's part of an investigation into fraudulent property titles and it involves a company named Albania Land Development owned by the prominent Qatari brothers Moutaz and Ramez Al-Khayyat, who are helping finance and build Kushner and Trump's luxury resort.

NPR reached out to the Al-Khayyat brothers, but they didn't respond to a request for comment.

When NPR emailed Kushner's Affinity Partners, a representative of a company called Sazan Real Estate Development responded with a statement from Asher Abehsera, a businessman Kushner has teamed up with to build projects in New York. "Our focus" the statement said, "remains on responsible stewardship, environmental enhancement, job creation, and creating long-term value for local communities."

The representative said Kushner's Affinity Partners investment firm has no role in this project and that "partners are involved as investors in their personal capacity."

Finding who those investors are, though, has been difficult. "From Albanian documents, it's impossible to find out," says Lindita Cela, one of Albania's most decorated investigative journalists.

For months, she's been tracking down a string of shell companies from Albania to the Netherlands that are connected to Kushner and Trump's project. "You see one company, and you'll see that 'who owns this company?' and it's another company," explains Cela. "If you go to this company, then another one, and then you'll find another one. This other company still brings to you not to any names, but to another company. You just need to keep digging, digging, digging."

She compares her investigation to opening a set of Russian matryoshka dolls, one after another. She's discovered several of the shell companies share the same address in Amsterdam and that each of them is worth a single euro.

They lead to the smallest matryoshka doll, a company named Interroyal BV, established with 18,000 euros in 2004 by a Russian citizen named Nikita Maximovich Vinogradov and a Bulgarian citizen named Zoya Georgieva Gyurova. Cela says each controls 25% of the company, but she says she hasn't been able to track either individual down. Neither has a public profile, but, on paper at least, she says the mysterious pair owns hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of Albanian property.

On a recent weekend on a part of that property, hundreds of Albanians converged to protest the project at the proposed site of the resort in Zvérnec. Albi Batozi, a 34-year-old software engineer, was among them. "I don't want anyone to build here because this is our land," said Batozi. "Public land is for everybody, not for just the small 1% of people."

Batozi says Prime Minister Rama is treating this land like it's his to sell, but he says this land belongs to all Albanians.

NPR reached out to the prime minister for comment on the project, and his office responded with a lengthy statement, which said in part: "The government understands that major investments can generate public debate and differing opinions."

The statement went on to say: "The ambition is to create a new benchmark for sustainable Mediterranean development."

Batozi believes the prime minister is obsessed with five-star luxury resort projects — overlooking, he says, the fact that Albania is one of Europe's poorest countries. "The problem is that we are comparing ourselves to big countries like they are investing and why are we not investing?" he says. "But Albania is like a studio apartment that barely holds place for Albanians. Where do we put this, these visitors? It's not that we can afford to build these big resorts like in Greece, for example."

Batozi says he grew up going to this beach. It was a place where all Albanians, no matter their social background, could freely visit. He says if Kushner and Trump's resort is built here, it'll be part of his country's coastline that is closed off to most Albanians.