RUFFLED FEATHERS

A $1.4 billion Jared Kushner-backed resort is putting Albania’s EU ambitions, its rule of law and its flamingos on the line

- BY JENNIFER WIGNALL Jennifer Wignall is a senior editor, print and digital at Newsweek. Contact her by email, [e-mail]

PRICE OF PARADISE Kushner's proposed investment in Albania has become a flashpoint in a wider debate over political influence, foreign capital and public accountability.

FOR MORE THAN TWO DECADES, ALBANIA did the unglamorous work in their bid to join the European Union: overhauling its courts, vetting judges and opening negotiation “clusters” with Brussels in rapid succession.

Then Jared Kushner went for a swim.

On a yacht trip off Albania’s Adriatic coast, Ivanka Trump described how she and her husband Kushner came across the turquoise shallows of the Vjosa-Narta lagoon and unspoiled Sazan Island—and began imagining a luxury resort there.

What followed was not simply a pitch. The legal and political conditions needed to build it were soon put in place. The site itself was among the most heavily protected stretches of coastline in the Mediterranean. The Vjosa-Narta lagoon, home to flamingos and more than 200 migratory bird species, sits inside a designated protected landscape; Sazan Island lies within Albania’s only marine and terrestrial national park. Under the country’s 2017 Law on Protected Areas, large-scale tourism construction in both was effectively barred.

That changed in February 2024, when Prime Minister Edi Rama’s parliamentary majority passed an amendment permitting five-star resorts inside protected areas—regardless of what their founding decrees allowed. Later that same year, Atlantic Incubation Partners, a company linked to Kushner’s Affinity Partners, was granted “strategic investor” status for a $1.4 billion resort on that land.