Albania Is Not for Sale: Kushner's $4 Billion Resort Triggers 'Flamingo Revolution', Asset Freeze and an EU Warning

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Albania Is Not for Sale: Kushner's $4 Billion Resort Triggers 'Flamingo Revolution', Asset Freeze and an EU Warning<br>//<br>Ukrainian Drones hit St. Petersburg during Putin's International Economic Forum, Kremlin humilated<br>//<br>Pashinyan's Civil Contract wins election, Armenia tilts to EU over Moscow<br>//<br>US House passes Ukraine aid and Russia sanctions bill over Trump's objections<br>//<br>Albania Is Not for Sale: Kushner's $4 Billion Resort Triggers 'Flamingo Revolution', Asset Freeze and an EU Warning<br>//<br>Ukrainian Drones hit St. Petersburg during Putin's International Economic Forum, Kremlin humilated<br>//<br>Pashinyan's Civil Contract wins election, Armenia tilts to EU over Moscow<br>//<br>US House passes Ukraine aid and Russia sanctions bill over Trump's objections<br>//

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Protesters in the Albanian capital | Photo credit: Alice Taylor/POLITICO

Albania's "Flamingo Revolution" is testing how far a government will go to protect a foreign investor's interests, and whether the EU will hold it accountable.<br>Albanian anti-corruption prosecutors froze the bank accounts of Albania Land Development, the company that bought beachfront plots for a luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner, as national protests against the project entered their seventh consecutive day. The preventive seizure was ordered by SPAK, the Special Prosecution Against Corruption and Organised Crime, as part of a property-fraud investigation into how land titles in a protected coastal wetland were acquired and how the area was stripped of its protected status. Albania Land Development is owned by the Syrian, nationalized Qatari brothers Moutaz and Ramez Al-Khayyat, who recently bought the plots in Zvernec, near the southern city of Vlora. One source put the frozen sum at about $195 million transferred for the land, a figure SPAK has not confirmed.<br>SPAK confirmed on 2 June that it had opened a case into the changes made in 2024 to the protected status of the Vjosa-Narta area and into how ownership of the land was obtained. Prosecutors said they would also examine how officials bypassed the normal public-tender system and the origin of the funds used to buy the land titles, in an area where ownership has been disputed since the collapse of communism in the 1990s. In 2024, the Albanian Parliament passed special legislation reclassifying Sazan and the Pishe Poro-Narta area to permit large-scale development, the move that made the strategic investor designation possible; opposition parties and environmental groups argued the changes were written to accommodate Kushner-linked investors. One administrator of Albania Land Development, Redi Struga, has reportedly been subject to searches.<br>Rama has tried to occupy both sides of the SPAK action, backing the investigation into the suspicious local sellers while defending the foreign investors as legitimate. He condemned the guards' conduct as "disgusting" and told parliament he wanted to make Albania "a destination to be envied in the region," insisting the final proposal had not been submitted, the environmental study was incomplete, and the lagoon itself would not be touched. He said five international architecture firms were redesigning the masterplan.<br>"The investors are within their rights. Blocking the transaction is arbitrary and negative," Rama told reporters.<br>He has refused to halt the wider plan. In an interview with Politico at the EU-Western Balkans summit in Tivat, Montenegro, he said the protests would never have gathered this much attention on their own.<br>"If it was not Jared, they would not give a shit about what is happening in Albania," Rama said.<br>Rama, a long-time friend of the Trump and Kushner families, claimed the anti-corruption and land defence campaign was being pushed by opponents of Donald Trump.<br>The protests, which civil society and international media have called the Flamingo Revolution, have grown well past their environmental starting point into a challenge to Rama himself, and the asset freeze is only the most visible of several legal and diplomatic pressures now bearing on his government.<br>Two projects, one coastline<br>The development is two ventures presented as one ambition. Off the bay of Vlora sits Sazan, Albania's largest island at about 5.7 square kilometres, a former Italian and then communist-era military base kept off-limits for decades and covered in Cold War bunkers and tunnels. On 30 December 2024, a Strategic Investment Committee chaired by Rama granted strategic investor status to Atlantic Incubation Partners, a firm affiliated with Kushner's Affinity Partners, for an Aman-branded eco-resort on the island, a project valued at about 1.4 billion euros and projected to employ roughly 1,000 people. Reuters, which saw the written decision, reported that the state would take part through a joint legal...