They Bought It Anyway: The Disputed Land Beneath Kushner’s Albanian Resort

In September 2024, villagers from Zvërnec wrote to Kushner’s development operation after recognising land they claimed in the resort plans. The site was “owned by the village and its residents,” they said, and construction would undermine rights they had spent years defending in court. The Wall Street Journal reviewed the letter and reported that Kushner’s operation did not answer it.

The warning arrived amid public reporting on the same problem. A New York Times investigation published that month described local families’ claims over land selected for the development. Kushner’s firm told the newspaper that it was confident the sellers held valid title and would withdraw if that proved untrue. The project did not withdraw. Albania Land Development completed the €110.25 million purchase on April 24, 2026, while the ownership case remained unresolved.

The residents say an Albanian court ruled in their favour in 2013. Shehu appealed, and the case remains unresolved after several retrials. Whatever their purpose, the appeals and retrials had a concrete effect. Thirteen years after the residents say they prevailed, the ownership question was still open when the resort’s corporate vehicle acquired the land. A dozen residents later showed Reuters deeds and tax records supporting their claims. Their lawyer, Kostandin Beko, said they would seek a court order to stop construction.

IMAGE: Zvërnec residents present property records overlooking land claimed by their families. (Source: Video still/Reuters)

By February 2026, the conflict was neither private nor obscure. It had appeared in international and Albanian reporting and remained before the courts. BIRN’s questions then placed the ownership dispute directly before Kushner’s representatives, who did not answer. Two months later, the project’s corporate vehicle closed the purchase. The record is plain. They chose to ignore the warnings and proceeded despite the residents’ unresolved claims to the land.

Shehu’s lawyer says his family has held the land since the Ottoman period. In a June 4 interview with the Albanian television programme Opinion, Shehu called his ownership claim “indisputable,” said an unnamed intermediary handled the sale and maintained that he did not know the investors. The villagers contest that account, and ownership remains unresolved. The continuing litigation did not prevent the development vehicle from completing a nine-figure acquisition.

Buyer and Ownership

The corporate structure requires precision. Albania Land Development bought the land from Shehu. Registry records reported in June showed that the company was wholly owned by Qatar-registered Sazan Land Holding, formerly Sazan Operations Holding. Sazan Land Holding was in turn wholly owned by Sazan Real Estate Development LLC. Albania’s beneficial-ownership register identifies Qatari nationals Ramez Al-Khayyat and Mohamad Al-Khayyat as the company’s ultimate beneficial owners, with 50% attributed to each. BIRN identifies them as brothers.

IMAGE: Registry records trace the land buyer through a Qatar-based corporate chain. (Source: 21st Century Wire graphic; Albanian and QFC registry records) 

An OCCRP review of the records likewise found that the brothers controlled Sazan Land Holding and that a director of the holding company also administered Albania Land Development. Separate BIRN reporting on the resort’s investors examined the people and companies assembled around the wider project. The filings show that Assets Real Estate Ventures held 70% of Sazan Real Estate Development, while Affinity Global Development held the remaining 30%.

Albania Land Development bought property within the planned project footprint. Registry records place the company under Sazan Land Holding, which is owned by Sazan Real Estate Development. Abehsera has also spoken publicly about the development. The records place the land buyer inside the corporate structure behind the Kushner-backed project. That connection also brings the purchase itself into focus, from the agreed price to the intended recipients and the handling of the proceeds.

Prices and Proceeds

Court documents obtained by BIRN show that more than one million square metres of land in cadastral zone 3951 was valued at €5.5 million in November 2025 and sold five months later for €122 million, an increase of roughly twenty-two times. A separate June 10 court order obtained by OCCRP froze more than €110 million held in a notary account from a land sale between Artur Shehu and Albania Land Development.

IMAGE: A €5.5 million valuation became €122 million five months later. (Source: 21st Century Wire graphic; sources: BIRN and OCCRP) 

BIRN examined a case file prepared by Albania’s Special Structure against Corruption and Organised Crime (SPAK), the body responsible for investigating and prosecuting major corruption and organised-crime cases. Agreements signed between November 2025 and May 2026 carried a combined nominal value of approximately €211 million. The court material recorded a preventive seizure of €128,354,437 across three payments, including €110.25 million connected to the principal Shehu sale. A June 10 court order froze more than €110 million from that transaction while it remained in a notary account. The price increases of up to sixty-four times concerned other parcels or stages in the broader sequence, not the principal sale alone.

According to BIRN, a notary testified before SPAK on May 28 about the Zvërnec contracts. Investigators examined material from her phone and recovered messages and documents connected to a suspected laundering scheme involving lawyers, intermediaries and figures already known to law enforcement.

SPAK case files examined by BIRN allege that Shehu and his associates trafficked cocaine from South America into European ports through commercial shipments and invested the proceeds in Albanian property. Prosecutors sought warrants for twenty suspects. They also allege that forged documents, false ownership records and enlargements of parcels on paper were used to assemble real-estate holdings. Shehu’s lawyer, Kujtim Cakrani, denies that his client trafficked drugs or forged records.

Nevertheless, the disputed title trail predates the current case. Pellumb Petritaj, who acted as a legal proxy for the Shehu family, was convicted at first instance in 2018 alongside three property officials over an Ottoman-language document used to claim 181.12 hectares in Zvërnec. Although appeals court acquitted all four in January 2023, the disputes over the records continued, and the current investigation has returned to the provenance of titles used within the same property network.

By the time prosecutors intervened, the proposed resort had turned contested coastal land into a nine-figure transaction, and on paper, the buyer had acquired the property. More than €110 million remained frozen in a notary account. The villagers remained outside the land they claimed as their own, while the sale put a nine-figure price on an ownership dispute it did not resolve.

Rama’s Answer

Rama’s government had already extended special legal status to the Kushner-linked plans for nearby Sazan Island. Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC, a Delaware company identified in Albanian reporting as Kushner’s vehicle for the island project, received ten-year “Investment/Strategic Investor—Special Procedure” status on December 30, 2024.

IMAGE: Rama’s office paired Sazan and Zvërnec in its defence of the developments.(Source: Albanian Prime Minister’s Office)

The €1.4 billion proposal covered 45 hectares of construction on the 562-hectare island and envisaged a joint entity with the state-owned Albanian Investment Corporation and Albanian Seaports Development Company. The designation offered expedited permits, licences and access to state land.

Yet a BIRN investigation found that the company had not submitted a complete business plan or feasibility study when the status was awarded. The government said accepting those documents later was standard practice and violated no law. Even so, the state had granted the privileges before it possessed the documents needed to evaluate the project’s full case.

Based on our own assessment and subsequent investigation, we found that the government’s blanket claim is not supported by the text of the legislation. Albania’s Strategic Investments Law permits applicants to supplement incomplete files, but Articles 12 and 16 indicate that this must occur before the Albanian Investment Development Agency (AIDA) completes its assessment and recommends granting strategic-investor status. If, as BIRN reported, the business plan required by Article 12 remained incomplete after the Strategic Investment Committee granted that status, the procedure appears inconsistent with the law’s prescribed sequence. Whether the same conclusion applies to the feasibility study depends on the implementing regulations governing the application.

Sazan and Zvërnec have different ownership and legal foundations. They form parts of the development vision publicly promoted by Kushner and Ivanka Trump and championed by Rama. Strategic status, planning decisions and government backing raised the political cost of reversing course, while ownership at Zvërnec remained contested.

Rama made his preferred resolution clear in an official statement on June 3. If the seller proved legitimate ownership, Rama said, he would receive the money. If not, the funds would remain with the Albanian state and be used for anyone who established a valid property claim.

IMAGE: Rama addresses the Zvërnec transaction after prosecutors froze the sale proceeds. (Source: Albanian Prime Minister’s Office)

His answer treated compensation as the remedy while leaving the project’s control of the land largely undisturbed. Years of litigation would determine who got paid after the state and investors had already chosen who would develop the coast.

The people of Zvërnec forced that dispute into the streets. Protests spread from the coast to Tirana, SPAK moved against the transaction and European officials warned that development in protected territory could complicate Albania’s path toward European Union membership. The European Commission said Albania’s environment minister had committed to suspending construction work pending a full environmental impact assessment. Rama disputed that account, saying there was no approved project to suspend, while he and the developers continued to defend the resort.

The money remains frozen, and the ownership fight remains open. Shehu denies the criminal allegations. The development company holds the land on paper, but the villagers are still very much in this fight and continue to demand property they say belongs to their families. The full SPAK file has not been made public, preventing independent scrutiny of the complete evidentiary record and the full range of people and companies examined by investigators.

Months before the purchase, BIRN reported the villagers’ ownership claims and put the conflict directly to representatives of Kushner’s company. They did not respond by the time the article was published. Albania Land Development later completed the land purchase. The claims were public, the questions went unanswered, and then came the €110.25 million deal.

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