Investigations

Albanian prosecutors seized €128 million linked to Kushner resort sales

Street protests over flamingo habitat on the Adriatic preceded the freeze while Affinity Partners pushed a luxury mega-resort.

On the Albanian coast near Vlorë, the Special Prosecution Against Corruption and Organized Crime ordered a preventive seizure of more than €128 million tied to beachfront sales linked to Jared Kushner’s planned mega-resort. Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan spent months with protesters, walked empty resort sites, and interviewed Prime Minister Edi Rama as the Zvërnec land deal unraveled in public.

Kushner’s firm Affinity Partners teamed with Qatari-backed Albanian Land Development on a roughly $4.4 billion Adriatic resort plan. The buyers targeted Zvërnec and the adjoining Vlora Lagoon, wetlands where pink flamingos nest and where Edi Rama’s government had long kept strict coastal protections. Crowds calling the movement the Flamingo Revolution marched in Tirana for more than 180 straight days and demanded Rama’s resignation.

Prosecutors opened the Zvërnec file while reviewing how protected plots became private sales. Court documents named in the investigation said one seller, Miami-based Albanian Artur Shehu, rested his claim on an Ottoman-language grazing deed from 1901. Albanian tribunals had already challenged whether those titles were forged when Kushner’s partners paid Shehu for land still listed under conservation rules.

Contracts dated April 24, 2026, moved more than €110 million for Shehu’s sale into a notary account held by Amela Mukaj, according to SPAK and CNA. Two smaller transfers the same day brought the frozen total above €128 million. A June 10 special court order locked the cash while a parallel cocaine-trafficking probe also hit villas at the nearby Green Coast complex.

Callaghan drove south to see what residents had described. At Green Coast, a Rama-era resort zone with hundreds of unfinished villas, guards blocked walk-in bookings while staff insisted the beach and rooms were sold out. He filmed vacant pools and quiet construction yards as concierges quoted €800 nightly rates, then blamed a Tirana bank retreat that never showed up on the beach.

He took a boat to Sazan Island, the former military base Ivanka Trump said she discovered during a yacht swim in 2021, and climbed broken glass and scrub toward the ridge she claimed to have hiked barefoot. The island has no dock, power, or paved paths, and locals warned of horned-viper habitat. The payments under SPAK review went to lagoon plots across the channel, not to Sazan, which remains state land without a finalized lease.

Callaghan later sat down with Rama as protesters threw eggs outside government buildings. Rama denied sharing a yacht with the Kushners, said he met them only when a Rothschild family yacht refueled at Durrës, and argued that any title listed in Albania’s property registry stood until a court said otherwise. He insisted no resort money had been frozen and that Sazan was still under negotiation.

SPAK published the Zvërnec seizure order the same week and said the notary funds would stay locked while Shehu’s titles were tested. OCCRP reported that investigators had also targeted Albania Land Development accounts as a property-fraud case fed clashes between police and demonstrators in Tirana. More than €110 million from Shehu’s sale sat in Mukaj’s escrow when the court signed the order.

Source video: Investigating Jared Kushner's Empire of Fraud & Corruption