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"Trump Island", French media: How Kushner and Ivanka discovered Sazanin

2025-12-05 10:35:10Aktualitet SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

"Trump Island", French media: How Kushner and Ivanka discovered

A key negotiator of the US president for Ukraine and the Middle East, Jared Kushner, has not forgotten about business and is considering opportunities in Serbia and Albania, writes the French weekly "Le Point".

Romain Gubert

The Albanian island of Sazan, a small rock on the Adriatic Sea, is called his paradise. It is the kingdom of snakes, worms, birds and even, they say, a few bears that enjoy the wild lavender and three-hundred-year-old pine trees.

In the summer, some tourists from Vlora land there. Two hours of swimming on a long beach before sailing to the cave of Haxhi Ali, a pirate who hid his treasures of gold coins there in the 17th century. A kind of maritime cathedral that has become a haven for sea turtles.

For several months, it has been called “Trump Island”. A strange place where it is forbidden to walk outside the large beach. For sixty years, Sazani has been a secret military base, of which today only a few ruined bunkers and thousands of mines remain. Enver Hoxha was particularly paranoid.

The communist dictator, who ruled Albania for nearly four decades, feared the landing of Italians, Yugoslavs, Americans and even Russians. He had stationed his own small army there. When the regime fell in the early 1990s, Sazan became a no-man’s land – the last uninhabited island in the Adriatic.

Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, fell in love at first sight with Sazan, a local legend. It happened four years ago. The couple was vacationing in Greece with their children. In Tirana, the capital of Albania, where luxury hotels are a dream, the opportunity was seized immediately.

Auron Tare, a former archaeologist and director of Albania’s National Coastal Agency, prepared a several-day visit for the Trump-Kushner couple and several other potential investors (Nasser al-Khelaifi, president of Paris Saint-Germain, and a businessman from the United Arab Emirates). A helicopter and a luxury yacht were made available to the small group.

Auron Tare knows all the most beautiful places in the area. He shows them the magnificent villa built by George Tenet, the son of Albanian immigrants and former CIA director under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He organizes a lunch at the best fish restaurant in the area, hosted by his former basketball teammate, Edi Rama, the prime minister of Albania. Rama, in power since 2013, is full of humor, with a warm Mediterranean style, simple and a good connoisseur of Donald Trump.

The operation is perfect. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner talk openly about what they could do with the island that Albania is ready to give them. They hire architects and lawyers. The following year, Kushner returns to Albania. With his partners, he is ready to invest more than $ 1 billion, not only in Sazan, but also in the bay opposite, on a giant area of ​​land north of Vlora, which is today undeveloped. Last year, in December, a month after Donald Trump's re-election, Kushner signed a pre-contract for a 99-year lease.

Ivanka Trump's love affair with Sazan is glamorous, but above all it's a story of money. Jared Kushner is by no means a naive investor. His group, based in Miami, has several billion dollars in assets around the world and especially in the Middle East (the Saudis are major partners and shareholders). One of his people in the Balkans is Richard Grenell, the former US ambassador to Germany and Trump's special envoy to Serbia and Kosovo. He has also negotiated another purchase in the region: a block of buildings in central Belgrade, the former headquarters of the Serbian army, bombed by NATO in 1999.

The future of "Trump Tower," as it will be called, is to be transformed into a luxury hotel, shopping mall, and expensive apartments. To give the land to Kushner, a special law was passed and the building was removed from the National Register of Historic Places.

In Belgrade, officials and activists are outraged. Radovan Kupres, founder of CRTA, and Robert Kozma, a Green MP, criticize corruption and the dubious land allocation. For Kozma, the land allocation to Trump's son-in-law is an example of "false nationalism" and favoring foreign interests.

The proliferation of real estate projects with Kushner is no coincidence for Serbia and Albania. He provides them with access to Middle Eastern investors and close to the White House. Unlike his first term, today he has no official role, but he is powerful and influences negotiations on Ukraine and the Middle East.

In Tirana, Elira Kokona, director of a state agency for the sale and valorization of state assets, manages important projects, including Sazan Island and the former summer palace of Enver Hoxha.

“The negotiations are professional. I’m not the one giving the green light,” she explains. So far, she has only communicated with “Brian,” Kushner’s representative in Albania, and has met Kushner only once at a restaurant./Le Point


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