Sazan Island: How Albania Sold Its Last Wild Island to the U.S. President’s Son-in-Law

On December 30, 2024, a committee chaired by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama signed Decision No. 23. With that signature, the entire 562-hectare island of Sazan, in the Bay of Vlorë, became the project site of a Delaware shell company called Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC, an affiliate of the private investment firm owned by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of the President of the United States.

There was no tender. No competing bid was solicited. The land was not for sale on any market. The legal mechanism that made the deal possible did not exist in Albanian law ten months earlier.

The terms are set out in the decision itself, published in the Albanian state corporate registry. A 99-year lease over the entire island. Forty-five hectares of permitted construction. A joint venture between the Delaware shell and two state-owned Albanian companies, the Albanian Investment Corporation and the Albanian Seaports Development Company. No taxes during construction. Public infrastructure, including roads, water, electricity, and sewage, to be built by the Albanian state at Albanian taxpayer expense. A €1.4 billion project value. An Aman Resort, the ultra-luxury chain whose suites in comparable properties begin around $4,000 a night, in a country where the average monthly wage is roughly €550.

The project sits inside the Karaburun-Sazan Marine National Park. From 2010, Albanian law assigned that area the highest legal conservation status the state could confer. Luxury hotel construction inside the park was prohibited.

In February 2024, the Albanian Parliament passed Law 21/2024, amending the protected-areas statute to authorize five-star hotel construction inside previously protected zones, including the Karaburun-Sazan park and the adjacent Vjosa-Narta lagoon. The amendment was opposed by every major Albanian environmental organization and by opposition parliamentarians, who accused the government on the parliamentary floor of writing legislation tailored to a single private investor whose identity had not yet been disclosed. Ten months later, the only applicant to receive a strategic investor decision under the rewritten law was Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC.

The Albanian Special Prosecution Office Against Corruption and Organized Crime, SPAK, has opened a formal criminal investigation into how the transaction was approved, how the protected land was reclassified, and how private land titles inside the adjacent mainland project were acquired and resold. The investigation is active.

The Funding

Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC has no disclosed operating address, no listed officers, and no public beneficial ownership filing. It was formed in Delaware on April 5, 2023, EIN 92-3329707, through Corporation Service Company, an incorporation agent used by tens of thousands of shell entities. It is the named applicant on the Albanian decision. Its connection to Affinity Partners is established by U.S. press reporting going back to 2024 and by the public statements of Asher Abehsera, the Affinity executive overseeing the Albanian development.

Affinity Partners is a private investment firm founded by Jared Kushner in July 2021, six months after he left his role as senior advisor in the first Trump administration. Per regulatory filings reviewed by Bloomberg in March 2026, Affinity manages approximately $6.2 billion. Per Affinity's own disclosures, 99 percent of its capital comes from foreign investors.

The largest single investor is Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund, which committed $2 billion in 2021. The investment was approved personally by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the documented written objections of PIF's own professional investment staff, who recommended against it on commercial grounds. Under the terms, Affinity is paid $25 million a year in management fees by the Saudi government, plus profit participation, regardless of performance. The United Arab Emirates and the Qatar Investment Authority each committed roughly $200 million more.

Through 2024, per the U.S. Senate Finance Committee investigation under Chairman Ron Wyden, Affinity had collected approximately $157 million in fees from these foreign government investors and had returned no profit to them. Wyden's written conclusion in the committee record: the firm "may not be motivated by commercial considerations, but rather by the opportunity for foreign governments to pay members of the Trump family."

The adjacent mainland leg of the project, 251 hectares inside the Vjosa-Narta lagoon with reported plans for up to 10,000 hotel rooms, is funded in significant part by the Qatari billionaire brothers Ramez and Mohamad Al-Khayyat, per a June 4, 2026 Balkan Insight investigation by reporter Vladimir Karaj, sourced to Albanian court records and Freedom of Information returns. That same investigation names the local Albanian counterparties whose land titles form the project's mainland base:

A U.S.-based businessman from Vlora, Artur Shehu, identified by BIRN as a principal beneficiary of property-transfer schemes investigated by Albanian authorities, with some investigations already resulting in confiscations, and named in a 2026 Italian RAI state-broadcaster documentary as having been investigated in connection with the Sacra Corona Unita mafia in Puglia. He has not been criminally charged.

The former Shehu family lawyer, Pellumb Petritaj, currently appealing a forgery conviction tied to land titles inside the project area, where the Albanian Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that "the falsity of this document has been proven."

A former President of the Tirana Court of Appeal, Alaudin Malaj, who issued rulings favorable to the Shehu land claims in 2013 and 2019, both later overturned by the Supreme Court, then resigned from the judiciary in 2020 before he could face Albania's anti-corruption vetting, with declared assets BIRN describes as making him one of the richest judges in the country. His family company holds land inside the project.

And Musa Kastrati, son of Shefqet Kastrati of the Kastrati Group, the conglomerate that holds the exclusive private management contract for Tirana International Airport, photographed alongside Ivanka Trump and Edi Rama during her January 2026 site visit, and quoted by The New York Times in March 2024 saying his company would play a role in the Kushner project.

This is the counterparty stack atop which the U.S. president's daughter and son-in-law's firm were placed.

The Conflict of Interest in the United States

Jared Kushner is not acting only as a private fund manager. He holds two simultaneous roles in which the same foreign money is present on the other side of the table.

The first is advisory. Kushner has served, across both Trump administrations, as a senior advisor on Middle East policy, in which capacity he has led or participated in U.S. delegations negotiating directly with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. Those three governments are the same investors paying his private firm $25 million a year and counting. The U.S. financial conflict-of-interest statute, 18 U.S.C. § 208, requires an executive-branch officer or employee to recuse from any official matter touching a financial interest. Whether the statute binds Kushner turns on his exact official designation, which the administration has kept ambiguous, describing him as unpaid and informal. That ambiguity is itself the mechanism: an advisor with no formal appointment is harder to subject to the recusal and disclosure rules that a formal appointee triggers, while exercising comparable influence.

The second role is the one that closes the loop. In January 2026 the White House named Kushner to the founding Executive Board of the Board of Peace, the international body authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 2803 on November 17, 2025 and chartered at Davos on January 22, 2026 to direct the reconstruction of Gaza. The Board controls the Gaza Reconstruction and Development Fund, administered by the World Bank, with at least $17 billion in pledges, including $10 billion from the United States, with an initial $250 million tranche in active congressional pre-notification. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar have each pledged at least $1 billion. The Board is chaired by President Donald Trump, in his personal capacity, for life, with the power to name his own successor. Kushner's assigned portfolio, in the White House's own words, is "investment attraction and capital mobilization."

State the overlap directly. The three foreign governments paying Kushner's private firm tens of millions in fees, regardless of performance, are the same three governments funding the Board of Peace, where Kushner is the official tasked with directing where their money flows. They are the same three governments whose nationals co-invest in his Albanian project. They are the same three governments whose interests he negotiates as a U.S. advisor. One man occupies the buyer's seat, the regulator-adjacent seat, and the diplomat's seat at once, paid by the parties on the far side of all three.

There is a further, separate U.S. conflict in the Electronic Arts transaction. In September 2025, Affinity joined Saudi Arabia's PIF and Silver Lake in a $55 billion buyout of Electronic Arts, the largest leveraged buyout on record. Per Financial Times reporting, Affinity's inclusion was structured in part to ease the deal's passage through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the federal panel that screens foreign acquisitions for national-security risk. CFIUS sits inside the executive branch his father-in-law runs. A foreign-government-funded fund managed by the president's son-in-law was used to smooth a foreign-government acquisition past the president's own foreign-investment review body.

The Conflict of Interest in Albania

On the Albanian side, the conflict is structural and runs through the office of the Prime Minister.

The same Strategic Investments Committee that granted the strategic investor status is chaired by Prime Minister Edi Rama. The same National Council for Territory and Water that issued the mainland development permits is also chaired by Edi Rama. The Albanian state did not merely approve the deal; through the Albanian Investment Corporation and the Albanian Seaports Development Company, it became the foreign shell company's joint-venture business partner. The state sits on both sides: regulator and counterparty.

The permits were issued while ownership of the underlying land was contested in open Albanian litigation. Asked by BIRN how permits could be granted on land whose title was disputed in court, Rama's office answered in writing that the Council "has no authority to verify property deeds" and that "the fact that there may or may not be claimants and legal proceedings related to one property or another has no connection whatsoever with the legal process of reviewing applications for construction permits." Plainly read: the state authorizing construction takes no position on whether the people signing the development agreements own the land.

The favoritism question Rama denies is the one the sequence raises on its face. A protected-areas law was rewritten in February 2024. No competing bidder was invited. The single beneficiary that emerged under the new law was the firm of the son-in-law of the incoming U.S. president, at a moment when Albania, an EU candidate and NATO member, had clear strategic reasons to seek Washington's favor. The New York Times reported that the arrangement "stirred resentments among some local landowners who question whether the Albanian government is courting Mr. Kushner in order to curry political favour with his father-in-law." Rama has denied this.

And the economics are a transfer from Albanian citizens to the foreign beneficiary. The investor pays no tax during construction. The Albanian state builds the infrastructure with public money. The land, until two years ago, carried the country's highest legal protection and belonged, in law, to all Albanians. Opposition figures and the BirdLife network describe the tax holiday plus state-funded infrastructure as an indirect public subsidy to a private foreign developer. BirdLife International has formally accused the government of giving Parliament false information about the project and has asked the European Commission to treat the destruction of Vjosa-Narta as a test of Albania's EU candidacy.

Since April 2026, when razor-wire fencing went up around Pishe Poro beach, thousands have protested in Tirana, Vlorë, and the coastal towns. Albanian police have stood between citizens and the fences around land their families farmed for generations. The placards carry a fixed vocabulary: Shqipëria nuk shitet. Albania is not for sale.

What the Record Establishes

The entire island of Sazan, plus development rights over 251 hectares of adjacent protected mainland, has been transferred under a 99-year, tax-exempt, state-infrastructure-funded lease to an entity affiliated with the private firm of the sitting U.S. president's son-in-law.

The legal mechanism authorizing it was written into Albanian law in February 2024 and used to sign the deal in December 2024, with no competitive tender, over the opposition of every Albanian environmental organization, and with the government later accused by BirdLife International of misleading Parliament.

The Albanian counterparty stack delivering the project, per the BIRN investigation and Albanian court records, runs through a forgery conviction the Supreme Court ruled proven, judicial rulings overturned by that same court, a resignation on the eve of anti-corruption vetting, a businessman named in an Italian mafia probe, and the son of the magnate holding the national airport concession.

The capital funding the deal is not American private money. It is Gulf sovereign money from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, the same three governments that pay Kushner's firm $25 million a year, fund the Board of Peace he sits on, and whose interests he negotiates as a U.S. advisor.

The United States Congress has formally demanded the disclosure records, named Albania specifically in the demand, set a deadline of April 2, 2026, and received nothing.

And Albanians, whose average monthly wage is roughly €550, will spend the next 99 years watching a $4,000-a-night resort sit on land that, until two years ago, their own law said belonged to all of them.

The records exist. The decision document exists. The court rulings exist. The Senate demands exist. The SPAK criminal file exists. The Balkan Insight investigation exists.