The Suspected Gangster Causing Headaches for Kushner’s Albania Deal
By Emilio Quesada ·
The persistent myth of American exceptionalism has always been most easily applied to geography—especially desirable coastlines.
The Price of Mediterranean Real Estate, Paid with Sovereignty
The persistent myth of American exceptionalism has always been most easily applied to geography—especially desirable coastlines. In Albania, a small nation struggling for stable governance and economic footing, we are witnessing the latest iteration of this delusion: the attempt by political elites to treat sovereign land as mere collateral for private venture capital. The $6 billion mega-resort planned by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump is not an investment in Albanian beauty; it is a declaration of entitlement. It assumes that because the Mediterranean is aesthetically pleasing, its governance can be outsourced to the highest bidder who happens to have deep pockets and fewer scruples than local legal counsel. The evidence—from aljazeera.com detailing SPAK’s investigation into forged deeds, to reports in abc.net.au highlighting the environmental catastrophe at Zvernec peninsula—paints a picture not of regeneration, but of systematic extraction.
When Private Deals Overrule Public Law
The mechanism is depressingly familiar. The narrative begins with an appeal to "natural beauty," as one developer’s partner stated regarding Sazan Island, citing only that they “swam to the island” on a podcast in May. This cavalier rhetoric conveniently ignores the decades-long claims of local residents. Consider Zvernec: villagers have argued for years that their beachfront land was stolen by Artur Shehu in the 2000s; therealdeal.com confirms this, noting that critics claim acquisitions were made through complex legal agreements designed to exploit Albania’s property system. The fact remains that a development group paid Shehu over $120 million for this land earlier this year, even as Albanian prosecutors sought his arrest for allegedly laundering drug proceeds and forging titles.
The developers—and the political figures who cheer them on, like Prime Minister Edi Rama, who celebrated the project as vital foreign investment—are betting that American power is a load-bearing wall so thick that local legal challenges will simply crumble under its weight. They are counting on Washington’s preference for financial expediency over fundamental principles of international law. Asher Abehsera, Kushner's partner, told The Wall Street Journal in 2024 that they had "no interest in developing anything that’s not rightfully or legally ours to develop," a statement dripping with the arrogance of those who believe their legal definitions supersede national statute.
The Inescapable Echoes of Imperial Overreach
What we are observing is nothing new; it is merely wearing the veneer of luxury branding and high-end architectural renderings. History provides a perfect, damning precedent for this exact dynamic: the Suez Crisis. In 1956, powerful external interests—the UK, France, and Israel—moved to seize control of vital economic resources (the Canal) from a sovereign nation (Egypt), overriding local nationalization efforts under the guise of necessary international stability. The shared mechanism is crystal clear: when an essential resource—be it a canal or a protected coastline—becomes strategically valuable enough for powerful external actors, the sovereignty of the host nation becomes negotiable, and the law itself becomes merely a set of suggestions to be circumvented by sufficient capital.
The developers here are not interested in celebrating Albania’s natural beauty; they are interested in controlling its economic arteries. They believe that because the land is valuable—because it promises profit—the mechanisms of local governance (SPAK, the courts, the villagers) can and should be bypassed. This is a debt incurred by Washington's wing willing to hand away strategic assets for short-term political gain.
The resort project must collapse under its own weight of illegitimacy. The moment that American capital treats sovereign land as merely another commodity on the open market—a place where deeds can be forged and local rights dismissed with a press release—the entire edifice loses its moral, and eventually its financial, foundation.