🇦🇱🇺🇸 An Albanian gangster may have lied to Jared Kushner about the feasibility of his and Ivanka Trump's planned holiday resort on the Albanian coast embroiling Kushner in his biggest controversy to date.

Residents of Zvërnec were shocked two years ago when Jared Kushner posted renderings of a planned Mediterranean resort on a slim peninsula sandwiched by the azure sea and a lagoon where flamingoes flock. 

The images were of a spit of land where their parents and grandparents once raised potatoes. The villagers contended the property was stolen from them in the 2000s by Artur Shehu—a suspected gangster who fled to Miami after a gunfight at his bar.

So they wrote a letter to Kushner saying they were locked in nearly two decades of court disputes with Shehu, urging the developers not to proceed. The site, they wrote, is “owned by the village and its residents.”

Instead, a Kushner-backed development group pressed ahead and paid Shehu over $120 million for the land earlier this year. Two months later, Albanian prosecutors sought Shehu’s arrest for allegedly playing a lead role in a sweeping international drug-smuggling operation that brought cocaine from South America to Europe in shipments of charcoal and fruit paste.

Shehu laundered money through property —including the peninsula in Zvërnec — that was stolen using techniques such as forged Ottoman-era land records, prosecutors said.

The controversy is the latest black eye for Kushner’s foreign real-estate ambitions—one piece of the post-2020 business career he launched after the first Trump administration. While most of his investing has been out of his $6 billion private-equity fund backed by Gulf wealth funds, Kushner also turned back to his real-estate roots. He talked of getting in front of the investment curve by developing in the Balkans, where tourism and property prices are rising, targeting Serbia and Albania

He struck a no-bid deal with Serbia’s government to develop state-owned land in central Belgrade—drawing local criticism that Serbia’s government was trying to cozy up to Trump, a charge the government denied. The Serbia plans fell apart after weeks of protests and the indictment of a cabinet minister who pushed through project approvals. Kushner pulled out in December.
 
The Albania project in Zvërnec has drawn a larger popular backlash. A video showing the Kushner-backed group’s private guards punching a local villager and dragging him across a beach sparked large daily protests in Tirana. They have continued for over two months, with protesters expanding their criticisms to endemic corruption and rampant development in a movement they call the Flamingo Revolution.

🔗 https://unwall.app/www.wsj.com/world/europe/jared-kushner-albania-shehu-drug-investigation-95391263