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Albania Is Not for Sale: Kushner's $4B Resort Triggers'Flamingo Revolution'

https://www.yacnews.com/albania-is-not-for-sale-kushners-4-billion-resort-triggers-flamingo-revolution-asset-freeze-and-an-eu-warning/
165•ortr•1h ago

Comments

jeffbee•38m ago
Are we sure they're not just negotiating over the price?
ddorian43•31m ago
Yes. The whole bought media, party in-power, the opposition are against the protests and are trying to downplay them.

Source: I live there. It's very easy to tell if you do.

jeffbee•27m ago
I'll take your word for it! But I reflexively add "... at this price" to such statements.
notrealyme123•20m ago
What do the locals have from a higher price?
kelipso•19m ago
Protests by the masses and business negotiations are very different.
ddorian43•18m ago
Very hard for the general public to gain things though.

It's too luxury, most likely will pay no taxes for years, you can import workers from elsewhere, etc etc.

It's not the first time this kind of thing happens in Albania and we've already seen results.

Normal people will just never be able to go there again. People in power will either get millions or 1+ free apartment/villa, or heavily discounted price (depends on how much power you have).

I was literally kitesurfing when they came and added fences to the road to block access to the beach.

pjc50•16m ago
People really don't get the idea of intangible cultural heritage and irreplaceable wetlands, do they? Not everything and everyone is for sale.
mothballed•11m ago
"Wetlands" is poorly understood by commenters in places like USA because there it's largely used as a bad-faith disingenuous prop by development prohibition interests or those seeking to use regulatory capture against smaller business / small land owners.
ludicrousdispla•13m ago
This isn't the Albanian people's first rodeo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Albanian_civil_unrest

tmaly•12m ago
Is the project more of a private residence or something that would bring tourism to the local economy?
ddorian43•6m ago
There are 2 projects here. And there is a lot of missing details from both.

But what has happened before is that:

The government gives free/cheap/exclusive public land to someone to build apartments/villas. They sell these to whoever wants to buy before starting construction. At the end of construction, with the profits, they build nice hotels at the frontline and keep for themselves without investing any of their own money in anything.

So they will most likely build apartments in Narta, sell them to the populace, and keep Sazan for themselves as luxury resort.

Something worse than this has started happening for high rises too, where they start selling before getting the permit even. So they don't invest their own money even to get the initial permit to start building.

bkovacev•37m ago
Jared Kushner tried a similar thing in Serbia[0] and failed after a public outrage.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/12/17/serbia-trump...

adf-aslk•37m ago
This island was a Russian naval base in the cold war with hundreds of underground nuclear bunkers.

Kushner apparently wants to build a billionaire resort with the protections required to insulate billionaires from their actions. Maybe UAE is too dangerous now.

Here is another article. Try not to be put off by the Rothchild connections, they are mostly irrelevant and based on Kushner's own statements:

https://tomselliott.substack.com/p/what-is-jared-kushner-act...

abirch•35m ago
It looks like Thiel is betting on Argentina.
shevy-java•30m ago
That would explain why Milei got so much US money already. I wonder when the people in Argentina wake up and realise this is a problem.
pjc50•27m ago
Argentina has been a mess for decades.
java-man•29m ago
as the custom goes, since 1945.
water-data-dude•31m ago
If things ever get bad enough that the wealthy need underground nuclear bunkers, the underground nuclear bunkers aren't going to be enough to protect them. The ordinary people who did the electrical, plumbing, security, etc. know where you are, and no level of security will protect you from an angry mob with nothing to lose.
shevy-java•31m ago
The USA is currently run by oligarchs. They try to buy their way into other countries via corruption. How much kickback did the government of Albania get already? It is highly suspicious how supportive they are of Trump.
ddorian43•26m ago
When Trump was running for the first time, the prime minister was extremely against Trump and even ridiculed him publicly on interviews "shame of our civilization" https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/13/albanian-prime-minister...

Which backfired after Trump won twice in US. But it's just business.

andix•3m ago
Incompetent oligarchs. If you can't even successfully bribe the Albanian or Serbian government, you are just really bad at corruption. Those are (sadly) among the most corrupt countries in the world.

edit: the governments appear to be supportive, but obviously aren't as supportive as they could be. Probably taking the bribe and not doing as much as they could.

totetsu•25m ago
I wonder how many more things like this are happening under the radar around the world
1over137•12m ago
This is hardly under the radar, it’s all over the news.
frereubu•10m ago
They mean an attempt like this, but one that they manage to keep quiet and out of the press.
pavel_lishin•9m ago
I wonder, if I asked the next dozen people I meet, whether they would have any idea about this.
guywithahat•11m ago
What do you mean under the radar? What is wrong with building a resort in Albania?OP's link is down but it looks like they're building a pretty normal resort in a normal tourist area. This is a very boring story https://www.foxnews.com/politics/jared-kushners-overseas-lux...
mcmcmc•7m ago
[delayed]
pjc50•17m ago
Somewhat higher stakes version of the Trump Aberdeen golf course:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-she...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Forbes_(farmer)

partial225•12m ago
This led to the greatest trolling of an individual ever when they deliberately stuck a windfarm directly off the coast of his new golf course. He's spent a couple of decades spending countless millions in losing a bunch of court cases, and of course, to this day, constantly moans to anyone who will list about "windmills".

As far as trolling goes, it's one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind.

fooblaster•4m ago
unfortunately this trolling has caused trump to try to halt all large offshore wind projects in the United States in federal land grants. it's terrible.
amiga386•5m ago
For the gory details, see

1. Donald Trump's Ego Trip - lessons for the new Scotland (2011) https://andywightman.scot/docs/trumpreport_v1a.pdf

2. You've Been Trumped (2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr6efmndvps

orwin•17m ago
I mean, the US still have Epstein's island, keep your billionaire child molesters there please, we have have enough on our hands taking care of our own. There's a small chance the guillotine comes out soon, we'll let you borrow it if it does, once the rust is washed off with iron-rich liquids.
qwlart•16m ago
Weird flagging in this submission. Pointing out that billionaires build nuclear bunkers is not allowed even though it is public knowledge.
appplication•12m ago
This is off topic and I understand we’re not supposed to comment on such things, but was anyone else mystified by the decisions that went into the scroll progress bar up top (on mobile)? It seems to be two part, where part of it would accurately reflect your scroll state, while the other had some weird latency associated with it. And then it ended up hidden behind the top of page blur unless you scrolled very aggressively, to the point where the blur could not keep up.
annagio_•4m ago
Half of Albania is butchered like this, beaches and green being destroyed to make resorts for the tourists to come. Go see Dermi or Vuno and then go see Borsh how clean it is, with no excavations at all or resorts being build.
stevenpetryk•28m ago
automated war machines are plenty to stop an angry mob imo.
organsnyder•27m ago
Maybe in some dystopian future. But right now there are still plenty of humans in the loop for supporting those machines.
graphime•17m ago
> The ordinary people who did the electrical, plumbing, security, etc. know where you are, and no level of security will protect you from an angry mob with nothing to lose.

Governments around the world already keep many locations/facilities secret and hidden from the public.

They will simply arrest you, or worse, just kill you.

What’s your solution to that?

actionfromafar•6m ago
Poe's Law.
b3lvedere•5m ago
The resort would destroy lots and lots of species and nature:

"Conservationists describe the wider zone, the Pishe Poro-Narta protected landscape, as one of the Mediterranean's last largely intact coastal wetlands, home to flamingos, more than 200 migratory bird species, Mediterranean monk seals and nesting loggerhead sea turtles."

locknitpicker•5m ago
> What is wrong with building a resort in Albania? OP's link is down but it looks like they're building a pretty normal resort in a normal tourist area. This is a very boring story

I'm not sure if you are trolling.

From the article:

> 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.

Furthermore.

> 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.

modzu•2m ago
the whole world is "owned" for the masters, chosen by god, to do with as they please

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