Jared Kushner wants to build a $1.4 billion luxury resort on a stretch of the Albanian coast. His private equity firm, Affinity Partners, has repeatedly said it had no idea there was any fight over who actually owns that land. A letter that just surfaced makes that claim very hard to believe.
Villagers from the Zvërnec peninsula wrote to Kushner’s firm nearly two years ago. In that letter, they asked the president’s son-in-law not to develop the property, saying it was stolen ground tied up in court battles that had dragged on for decades. So when the firm later insisted it never heard about any dispute, the paper trail told a different story.
The Letter That Changes The Math
Here is the part that matters. According to the villagers, the site the resort is planned for is “owned by the village and its residents.” They did not just grumble about it at a town meeting. They put it in writing and sent it straight to the firm.
The letter, first detailed in a deep look at the project, asked for one of two things. Either pay the families for the land, or hit pause on the whole project until the ownership question was settled in court. Neither of those is a small request. Both of them prove one thing clearly: the firm was told about the fight before the bulldozers showed up.
That is the whole ballgame. You cannot claim you were in the dark when a group of villagers mailed you a letter spelling out the exact problem.
“We Did Not See Or Hear Of Any Dispute At All”
That is a direct quote from Asher Abehsera, chairman of Sazan Real Estate, one of the outfits behind the project. He said it flat out. No dispute, no warning, nothing on their radar.
The problem is the letter. It exists. It was sent. And it lays out the ownership fight in plain language. When a company denial runs head-on into a document that predates the denial by two years, the document usually wins. That is exactly what makes this letter such a headache for the developers.
A spokesperson for Kushner did not respond when asked to comment. Silence is not a great look when a piece of paper is calling your official statement into question.
The Gangster And The Ottoman Deeds
Now for how the land got messy in the first place. The villagers say the property was grabbed by a man named Artur Shehu, described as a suspected gangster. The accusation against him is wild in its specifics: he allegedly forged land records dating back to the Ottoman era to claim ground that was not his.
This is not just a rumor passed around the village. Shehu’s alleged middleman in the land grab was sentenced back in 2018 to three years in prison for the fraudulent acquisition of 187 hectares of land in Zvërnec, right next to where the resort is planned. That is roughly 460 acres of coastline tangled up in a fraud conviction.
The case has not been tidied up since. It has bounced between courts and stayed hotly contested, which is a polite way of saying nobody can agree on who owns what. Between Ottoman-era paperwork, courts that keep tossing the case back and forth, and years of litigation, it is a genuine knot. But a knot is not the same as nothing, and the firm knew the knot existed.
Bulldozers, Barbed Wire, And A Punch On The Beach
For a while this was a slow-burn dispute over old deeds. In late May, it turned physical. Bulldozers rolled in. Barbed-wire fencing went up along the beaches. Suddenly the sand people had used their whole lives was blocked off.
Then came the video. In footage that spread fast, private security guards working for the Kushner-backed group were caught on camera punching a villager in the face and dragging him across the beach. That clip did more to turn this into a political flashpoint than any court filing ever could. It is one thing to argue about land titles. It is another to watch hired muscle drag a local man across the sand.
Village leader Kostaq Konomi kept his own demand simple. “The only thing that I want now is that they give me back my land,” he said. No lawsuit language, no political spin. Just a man who says the ground under the resort belongs to him and his neighbors.
The Politics Nobody Wants Their Name On
You cannot talk about this project without talking about who signed off on it. Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama approved the development plans, and that approval has become its own scandal.
An opposition leader in Albania said Rama was “seeking to buy political influence” from Trump by greenlighting the son-in-law’s resort. That is a serious charge: the idea that a foreign leader waved through a Trump family business deal to get on the good side of the White House.
Another opposition figure, parliament member Agron Shehaj, went after the process itself. He said the way the developer was picked lacked transparency and, in his words, “makes it look like this is a private deal that is in the political interest of the prime minister of Albania.” Both Rama and Kushner have pushed back and rejected any suggestion that former President Donald Trump had anything to do with how the development moved forward.
From Protected Land To Prime Real Estate
Here is a detail that deserves more attention than it gets. The site was not always up for grabs. It was a protected area. Then it wasn’t. At some point the status flipped, and the ground went from off-limits to cleared for a billion-dollar resort.
On top of that, there was no competitive bidding process. No open contest where different developers pitched their plans and the best offer won. The project went to Kushner’s group without that step, which is a big reason critics keep using the phrase “private deal.” When public land changes hands with no auction and no open process, people start asking who got a phone call.
Add it up and you get a picture that makes a lot of people uneasy. Protected land opens up. No bidding. A Trump family firm gets the prize. A prime minister who wants to stay close to the White House signs the papers. Each piece can be explained on its own. Stacked together, they raise the exact questions the opposition keeps shouting about.
What This Actually Comes Down To
Strip away the international drama and the story is pretty basic. A group of villagers say land was stolen from their families. They warned the developer in writing. The developer said it never heard a peep. Then the letter turned up.
Environmental groups have their own fight going, arguing the resort will chew up the natural setting of the uninhabited island at the center of the plan. That is a separate line of opposition, and it has plenty of backers. But the land-ownership question is the one that could actually stall the whole project, because it comes with court cases, a fraud conviction, and now a document that undercuts the firm’s public story.
The developers have a $1.4 billion plan, a prime minister’s signature, and construction already underway behind barbed wire. The villagers have a letter, a criminal case tied to the land, and a leader who keeps repeating the same six words: give me back my land. Those two positions cannot both be right, and the letter just made the firm’s version a lot harder to defend.
For now, the barbed wire stays up, the court cases stay open, and the people who mailed that warning two years ago are watching bulldozers work land they say was never sold. That gap between what the firm said and what the villagers can prove is the heart of this whole mess.
