Ivanka and Jared's Private Island Purchase is Under Investigation

A secret deal to take protected land.

Last weekend Ivanka Trump went on David Senra’s Founders podcast and told a story about how she and Jared Kushner came to own a Mediterranean island. The way she frames it, they were on a friend’s boat and stopped for a swim when they noticed Sazan, a 1,400 hectare island off the Albanian coast, and they were so taken with it that they swam ashore and hiked barefoot all the way to the top, and the place simply stayed with them. Over the years that followed they “developed the opportunity” to realize its potential.

The friend with the boat was Nat Rothschild, heir to one of the oldest banking fortunes in Europe. Kushner laid out the fuller version in another recent podcast. They got picked up in Montenegro on Rothschild’s yacht, sailed toward Corfu, spent a couple of days in Albania, and one of those nights Prime Minister Edi Rama came aboard. So the chance encounter with a forgotten island was actually arranged on the boat of a billionaire financier, with the head of the government that would later hand them that island sitting across the table. So it was not exactly the magic accident that Ivanka described, and the land wasn’t empty either.

Sazan is a former military base, first fortified by Fascist Italy and later held by Communist Albania, and it sits inside the Karaburun-Sazan Marine National Park. It remained a national military asset until December 2024, when a presidential decree quietly removed it from that list, and a day later, on December 30, the Albanian government granted strategic investor status to Atlantic Incubation Partners, an entity tied to Kushner. That designation allows the project to bypass the review process that any other developer would have to pass through. The land along the coast had been classified as protected, including parts of the Vjosa-Narta lagoon where flamingos, seals, and sea turtles nest. The government’s own paperwork pegs the investment at 1.4 billion euros and promises a thousand jobs, while Ivanka has talked about as many as 10,000 hotel rooms and villas. Albanians have already started protesting against the project in large numbers.

Albania’s special anti-corruption prosecutor, SPAK, has opened an investigation into the funds used to acquire the land titles and the way those titles were sold on to investors. Thousands have marched under banners reading “Albania is not for sale” and “Ivanka, go home,” and when private security at the site dragged a protester across the ground on camera, the government revoked the licenses of two security firms, arrested a guard, and stripped the local police chief of his post, while also charging fifteen of the protesters.

Affinity has forced their way into protected land before, including a 99-year lease in Serbia, granted essentially for free, on the bombed-out former Yugoslav Army General Staff headquarters in central Belgrade. The land was protected as a cultural site for decades, but Affinity was still able to get their hands on it. To clear the way for a 500 million dollar Trump-branded hotel, that protected status was stripped in late 2024 on the basis of a document that was later proven to be forged. When the courts closed in, President Vucic’s government simply passed emergency legislation to override the heritage designation and force the project through, which set off a wave of youth protests and a human chain around the ruined complex. The whole thing finally died in December when Serbian prosecutors charged the culture minister and three other officials with abuse of office and forgery, at which point Affinity withdrew within hours, releasing a statement about how meaningful projects should unite rather than divide.

Will this new project on Sazan island end the same way?

https://thefreethoughtproject.com/government-corruption/ivanka-and-jareds-private-island-purchase-is-under-investigation