Kushner venture buys Albanian land from an accused money launderer

In April 2026, Albania Land Development, an entity owned by the Kushner-backed venture Sazan Real Estate Development, paid 110 million euros, about $125 million, to Artur Shehu for land on the Zvernec peninsula on Albania's Adriatic coast. The venture, which brings together Jared Kushner, the developer Asher Abehsera, the Albanian conglomerate Kastrati Group and Qatari investors from the Al-Khayyat family, plans a $5 billion luxury resort spanning Zvernec and the nearby state-owned island of Sazan. Kastrati approached landowners in Zvernec on the venture's behalf. The group paid well over $240 million in total to private landowners on the peninsula. Villagers in Zvernec had contested Shehu's ownership in Albanian courts for nearly two decades, saying the land their families once farmed was transferred to him by local property officials in the 2000s. In September 2024, months after Kushner posted renderings of the planned resort, a group of villagers wrote to his firm urging the developer to refrain from actions that undermine the property rights of the village while the disputes continued. Albania's High Court found that one parcel was secured in 2007 using a mistranslated Ottoman-era land record in which an archivist substituted the name of Shehu's ancestor for the original owner's; the lawyer and the archivist involved were later convicted on falsified-documents charges, and the lawyer's case is being retried. In June 2026, Albania's special anti-corruption prosecution office obtained a judge's order for the arrest of Shehu and 19 others, alleging he held a leadership position in an international ring that shipped cocaine from South America to Europe and laundered the proceeds through Albanian real estate, including the Zvernec land. Prosecutors froze his proceeds from the sale, and on June 2 froze Albania Land Development's bank accounts. Shehu's lawyer, Kujtim Cakrani, said Shehu is neither a drug dealer nor a land thief, that his family's claims rest on legitimate historical documents, and that he never dealt directly with Kushner. Sent a list of four Zvernec landowners including Shehu in a 2024 message, Abehsera said "none of these are our partners"; in June 2026 he said he did not know whether his firm had paid Shehu for land and denied prior knowledge of the disputes, saying "We did not see or hear of any dispute at all." A spokesman for the development group said the Albanian legal system is the appropriate venue for resolving questions about prior transactions, that the group is not itself under investigation, and that it continues to believe the land acquisitions were lawful. In late April the group fenced the protected peninsula with razor wire, and video of a hired security guard striking a villager helped set off sustained protests in Tirana.