By The Briefcase Team | Tuesday, August 11, 2026 | 8 min read

In the summer of 2021, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were cruising the Adriatic on a yacht when they hopped off for a swim, waded ashore on a rugged, uninhabited island, and, in Ivanka's words, "effectively that's how we found it," per The Atlantic.

The "it" they found was Sazan, Albania's largest island, a former top-secret military base so cut off that vegetation and rare wildlife had reclaimed the entire place. What has happened in the five years since is one of the strangest real estate stories of the decade. It involves a suspected cocaine trafficker, a $126 million pile of frozen euros, forged Ottoman-era deeds, a former Communist dictator's 173,000 bunkers, hundreds of thousands of Albanians in the streets carrying inflatable flamingos, and a former U.S. president's son-in-law wondering aloud at an investment conference why Albania seems so "fully undeveloped as a nation."

We will tell you why. It is a great story.

Kushner started Affinity Partners in mid-2021. In 2022, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund committed $2 billion to the firm, overruling its own internal screening panel. The screeners said no. A committee chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said yes anyway.

In December 2024, roughly two months after Donald Trump's reelection, an Albanian investment committee chaired by Prime Minister Edi Rama gave preliminary approval to Kushner and Ivanka Trump's plan to turn Sazan Island into a 1.4-billion-euro, 45-hectare luxury resort, per The Atlantic. The combined Sazan-plus-mainland development is now valued around $4 billion.

Rama, we should note, called Trump in 2016 with a hearty "God forbid!" After Trump won in 2024, Rama hailed his "remarkable victory" and suggested God had "saved Trump also to make Europe wake up." Politics is nothing if not a rich text.

To speed things along, Albania in 2024 amended its own environmental regulations, removing construction bans in protected ecological zones. The European Parliament noted this might affect Albania's compliance with EU accession standards, which is diplomatic language for "you might be shooting yourselves in the foot."

The state owns Sazan, so a long-term lease is required. The mainland portion, next to a lagoon full of nesting flamingos, sea turtles, and other protected species, is privately owned. It is that private land, at a village called Zvernec, where the story goes off the rails.

The mainland site was sold to the Kushner-linked development vehicle in April 2026 by a Miami-based businessman named Artur Shehu, for over $120 million, per the Wall Street Journal. Shehu says his family has owned the land since Ottoman times.

His lawyer, Kujtim Cakrani, told Al Jazeera that his client is neither a drug trafficker nor a document forger.

Which is a curious thing for a lawyer to have to say.

Two months after the sale closed, Albanian prosecutors sought Shehu's arrest as an alleged leader in an international cocaine-smuggling operation. Per prosecutors, the network moved South American cocaine to European ports concealed in shipments of charcoal and fruit paste. Because when you are trying to smuggle cocaine, the ideal cover story is another product nobody looks at closely, like charcoal, or fruit paste, or a Peloton bike delivery. The route from South American port to Rotterdam is apparently paved with imaginative logistics.

Albania's Special Structure Against Corruption and Organised Crime, known by the excellent acronym SPAK, is now investigating whether the deeds Shehu used to sell that land to the Kushner group were forged. Prosecutors allege the deeds were falsified to disguise proceeds from cocaine trafficking, per Al Jazeera.

Authorities have frozen roughly 110 million euros, or $126 million, linked to the sale in a notary's account. The buyer wired the money. The seller, allegedly, cannot access it. This is what actuaries refer to as "a bad Q4."

Shehu, meanwhile, allegedly fled to Miami some years ago after a gunfight at his own bar, per the Journal. Not a gunfight near his bar. A gunfight at his bar. The kind of biographical detail that, in a proper due-diligence memo, would appear in bold, followed by an exclamation point, followed by the word "reconsider."

Here is the part where the story becomes truly extraordinary.

The villagers of Zvernec have been in court with Shehu for nearly two decades, arguing the land was collectively owned and stolen from them in the 2000s, per the Journal. Their parents and grandparents once raised potatoes on it. They possess title deeds and tax records they say prove ownership. They have been losing this fight for years, which happens when your legal opponent has, according to prosecutors, several million euros of alleged cocaine money and a friendly notary.

Roughly two years before Kushner's group closed on the land, after Kushner posted renderings of the resort online, the villagers wrote him a letter. They told him the land was allegedly stolen. They described the nearly two-decade court fight. They said the site "is owned by the village and its residents." They urged the developers not to proceed.

The Kushner group proceeded.

Nikolin Markpalaj, one of the landowners, told Al Jazeera: "I told them it would not be easy for them to take this land and enjoy someone else's land and property. What is happening in this country is madness."

A spokesperson for the Kushner-Trump venture said the Albanian legal system is the appropriate venue for resolving these questions and pledged to cooperate with any lawful process. Which is technically true and also the corporate PR equivalent of "we heard the smoke alarm, and we choose to interpret it as a suggestion."

By late May 2026, hundreds of thousands of Albanians were in the streets. The immediate trigger was a video of private security guards punching and dragging a protester along the Zvernec beach. Ditmar Bushati, a former Albanian foreign minister, called it "the tipping point," per The Atlantic. By July 4 weekend, roughly 200,000 people had mobilized.

They named it the Flamingo Revolution, after the wild flamingos that nest in the very wetland the resort plans to develop. Protesters carry inflatable flamingos, signs saying "Albania is not for sale," and signs saying "I don't want Albania like Dubai." That is the crowd summary of a coherent worldview: fewer artificial ski slopes, more birds.

For context on scale: Albania has fewer than 3 million people. Two hundred thousand protesters is the equivalent of about 22 million Americans in the street, which is a number that would rearrange most cabinet meetings.

The country's revulsion at what protesters call "government decisions made in secret, for the benefit of the few, motivated by money linked to oligarchs" (that is Fatos Lubonja, a former Communist-era political prisoner, quoted in The Atlantic) has cultural roots. Enver Hoxha, Albania's Communist dictator from the end of WWII to 1985, was so paranoid about foreign invasion he built 173,000 concrete bunkers across a country of 3 million. When your national inheritance is "your grandfather built one bunker per fourteen citizens because he thought Yugoslavia might come at any moment," you develop, as sociologist Dana Fisher put it, "antibodies to signs of state capture."

Three things worth flagging, all of them portable to any real estate deal that involves a seller with an interesting biography.

One: The line between a legitimate off-shore real estate deal and a money laundering vehicle is often just the paperwork. SPAK's theory is that Shehu's alleged cocaine proceeds were laundered into Albanian real estate using falsified deeds, then converted into a $126 million wire from a Saudi-backed U.S. fund. If that theory holds up, Kushner's group did not launder the money. It was the exit liquidity. Which is arguably worse, from a reputational standpoint, because "we bought the exit ticket" is a very specific place to be in a prosecutor's flowchart.

Two: Warning letters from locals are, statistically, worth reading. They are also, statistically, ignored. In the developer's defense, every large project attracts objectors. In the villagers' defense, "we sued this guy for nineteen years and he then got arrested for running the alleged cocaine ring" is not the usual NIMBY letter.

Three: The strategic-investor designation that fast-tracked Sazan was granted by a committee chaired by the same prime minister publicly courting the developer's family business. That is not illegal. It is, however, the sort of thing that ends up in a criminal referral pack once the environmental protections a country dismantled to enable the project get investigated by that country's anti-corruption prosecutor. Which is, in fact, exactly what has happened.

Ivanka Trump described the Sazan project as "the culmination of all of my experience in real estate." Kushner said he "really didn't know anything about the country" and did not understand "the darkness of the history." An entire lagoon of nesting flamingos, roughly 200,000 protesters, a suspected cocaine trafficker, forged Ottoman deeds, 173,000 disused bunkers, a $2 billion Saudi backer, and a European Parliament worried about compliance are all currently offering, we would say, a rather generous tutorial.

Somewhere in Zvernec, a village grandmother is watching a flamingo land in her old potato field. She is entirely uninterested in your resort renderings.