Kushner's $125M Albania Land Deal Faces Legal Jeopardy

Kushner's development group paid €110 million ($125 million) in April to Artur Shehu for land in Zvernec, Albania — two months before prosecutors indicted Shehu for allegedly leading a cocaine-trafficking ring.

"Theoretically, the courts have the authority to temporarily block the disputed development," said Sotir Dhamo, an urban planning professor at Polis University in Tirana. "In practice, the courts are not fully independent from politics and hidden economic interests."

The venture, Sazan Real Estate Development, paid Shehu through an entity called Albania Land Development, according to prosecutors. The group spent more than $240 million total on land from private owners including Shehu, according to a person familiar with the sales. Two months after the payment, Albania's special prosecutors' office, known as SPAK, secured a judge's order to arrest Shehu and 19 others for allegedly running a drug network that moved cocaine from South America to Europe in shipments of charcoal and fruit paste. Prosecutors have frozen Shehu's proceeds from the sale.

The controversy threatens to derail a $5 billion project that Prime Minister Edi Rama has championed as a flagship foreign investment, and it marks the second Balkan setback for Kushner after his Serbia deal collapsed in December. It also raises questions about due diligence in a region where property records are notoriously unreliable and court disputes over land are common.

Villagers in Zvernec, a tiny coastal community outside Vlore, say they warned Kushner's firm two years ago. In September 2024, they sent a letter urging the developer "to refrain from taking actions that undermine the real property rights of the village," according to a copy reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The villagers contend Shehu stole their land in the mid-2000s using forged Ottoman-era land records.

"The falsity of this document has been proven," Albania's High Court ruled in one case, referring to a mistranslated Ottoman-era record that substituted Shehu's ancestor's name for the original owner. The lawyer and archivist involved were later convicted on falsified-documents charges.

Shehu, 60, lives in Miami, where property records show he owns a 4,000-square-foot home on Miami Beach's Flamingo Drive. He moved to the U.S. in 2001 and won asylum after citing attacks from communist gangs, according to his lawyer, Kujtim Cakrani.

"He has absolutely no connection to the charges," Cakrani said. "He is simply a landowner, coming from a large landowning family."

Shehu's legal troubles predate the Kushner deal. In 2012, Italian prosecutors sought his arrest in a case against an Italian crime family, noting that Shehu co-owned a gelateria in Albania with a mafia boss who wired him over €1 million. The Italian judge rejected the arrest request, citing insufficient evidence. European law enforcement later spotted him in Monaco and Mallorca with suspected traffickers, though he wasn't charged in those investigations.

The Flamingo Revolution

The deal has triggered the largest protests Albania has seen in years. A video showing the development group's private security guards punching a local villager and dragging him across a beach went viral in late May, leading to daily demonstrations in Tirana that have continued for over two months. Protesters call their movement the Flamingo Revolution, carrying signs with images of Kushner, flamingoes, and Trump.

The backlash has drawn international attention, including from pop star Dua Lipa, who holds Albanian citizenship. "What I actually find concerning is the principle that the government could just change the law to remove the environmental protection without any kind of public consultation," she said on a podcast.

The Albanian Parliament fast-tracked the project in December 2024 by amending legislation that permits construction in environmentally sensitive areas. Opposition leader Sali Berisha has alleged that Rama may have been "seeking to buy political influence" from Trump by approving the development plans.

Asher Abehsera, chairman of Sazan Real Estate, denied prior knowledge of the land disputes. "We did not see or hear of any dispute at all," he told the Journal in June. A spokesman for the group said the Albanian legal system is "the appropriate venue for resolving questions about land ownership and the integrity of prior transactions."

For the villagers of Zvernec, the stakes are personal. "The only thing that I want now is that they give me back my land," said Kostaq Konomi, village leader of Zvernec.

The development group is currently working on an environmental review document, a prerequisite to government approvals before construction. With Shehu's funds frozen and court disputes still winding through the system, the project's future remains uncertain.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.