In a well-produced podcast interview released this week, Ivanka Trump talked about her latest real estate project. She described it as an “incredibly beautiful 1,400-hectare private island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea,” and described the project, which stretches five miles along Albania’s beautiful coast, as a resort and hotel.
But a project backed by the US president’s daughter and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, includes plans to develop a nature preserve along the opposite coast of the island, and conservation groups say it is already damaging the beautiful area that Trump has praised.
The luxury project sparked massive street protests in the capital Tirana, with demonstrators carrying pink cardboard cutouts of flamingos whose habitat they say is threatened. There has also been widespread public opposition in Albania, which has one of the lowest GDP per capita in Europe.
Ariel Bruner, European director of environmental charity BirdLife, said she and other conservationists visited the reserve in early May and saw excavators digging into the beach and trucks laying gravel. “There was no sign by the lagoon where they were cutting the road, or on the shore where the machinery was operating. There was no sign of any type of permit or permission, or even just a declaration of who they were.”
Meanwhile, Albania’s prime minister continued to defend the development of his country’s Adriatic coast, while insisting that the project has not actually begun yet and that he is “addressing the environmental impact.”
The first element of the project, uninhabited Southern Island, was once a communist-era military base.
“We were on a friend’s boat and we stopped for a swim. That’s essentially how we found it. We swam to the islands, hiked barefoot to the top, and we were just fascinated,” Trump told US-based podcaster David Senra earlier this week, and the project has caught the attention of many people in Albania and beyond.
The second location is an undeveloped beach called Piche Pollo Narta, located within the Vijosa Narta Protected Landscape, a nature reserve. It is home to more than 200 species of birds, including flamingos and pelicans, as well as endangered species such as monk seals and nesting sea turtles.
CNN contacted Jared Kushner’s private equity fund about the project, but was redirected to another company, Southern Real Estate Development LLC, and was told the investor was involved in a personal capacity.
“We are excited about the opportunity to create a world-class destination and make the largest private investment in the region’s history,” Asher Abecerra, chairman of Southern Real Estate Development LLC, said in a statement. “We remain focused on responsible management, environmental enhancement, job creation, and long-term value creation for the community.” “We respect the public and institutional processes currently underway and are ready to move forward as they unfold.”
Kushner said at an investment summit last year that while the ship was sailing off the coast of Albania in 2021, Prime Minister Edi Rama boarded the ship for talks and discussed investment opportunities a year later. In 2024, Kushner posted concept art for the Albanian Coast project on social media.
Critics have repeatedly raised concerns that Mr. Kushner’s private business dealings pose a conflict of interest, given that he currently serves as a special envoy to his father-in-law, President Donald Trump. He has received significant support from sovereign wealth funds in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which also carry out official government work.
On Wednesday, Rama acknowledged that Kushner and Ivanka Trump were involved in the venture, but said it included a broad group of investors and architects from Japan, Denmark, Turkey, Greece and France.
Prime Minister Rama also responded to a question from CNN’s Isa Soares about whether any real estate development is underway on the island and the nature reserve, insisting that “there are no projects yet” and that “we are working on the environmental impact.”
“There is no way that the family of the president of the United States could take over a sanctuary with flamingos and be killed by the flamingos,” Rama said, adding that the developer group had hired a consulting firm to study the environmental impact.
The Prime Minister insisted that the project was not about “pouring concrete on a flamingo’s head” but proving that development and nature “can coexist”.
Earlier this week, Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office SPAK told local media it had opened an investigation related to the project, but did not provide further details. CNN reached out to SPAK for comment but did not receive a response.
Part of the backlash in Albania is related to changes to the country’s natural law that will take effect in 2024, allowing luxury resorts to be built in environmentally protected areas. The law currently exempts hospitality activities associated with “outstanding buildings of five stars or higher.”
“Usually the fact that rich people can get away with doing whatever they want is something that is hidden under some sort of language like public interest or extraordinary circumstances. It’s quite remarkable that the law actually states that luxury resorts are exempt,” BirdLife’s Brunner said. “This is one of the most brutal legal texts I have ever seen in the environmental field in my career.”
The legal changes do not conflict with European Union law, which has been a sticking point in Albania’s EU accession negotiations.
“We have already expressed our concerns to the Minister of the Environment about the potential flaws in this project,” a European Commission spokesperson told CNN regarding the development of the Piche Polo Nalta protected area. “Our concerns are not new… The repeated extensions of the (Albanian) Law on Strategic Investments continue to raise concerns about possible environmental impacts, especially in protected areas.”
Conservation groups say they believe the Albanian government intends to push ahead with this development and other small-scale projects before reinstating nature law to comply with EU regulations.
A European Commission spokesperson told CNN that Albania’s Ministry of Environment “has assured us that the construction work has been stopped.” The spokesperson also said SPAK’s anti-corruption investigation “reportedly goes beyond environmental issues.”
CNN has contacted Albania’s Ministry of the Environment and the National Protected Areas Authority for comment.
Conservationists and members of the public have been protesting the project for weeks, asking for permits and urging lawmakers to help protect the wild coastline.
“This project is very destructive because it is planned to be built within a protected area, within a protected landscape, which is actually one of the most pristine wetlands in the Mediterranean,” environmental biologist Merijan Nezaj from the Albanian organization Protection and Conservation of Nature Albania (PPNEA) told CNN. “As we speak, there are no permits available for public use.”
PPNEA said in a statement that some of the ecological damage to the dunes is “already irreversible” and that construction “will block one of the two openings connecting Narta Lagoon to the sea, cutting off tidal exchange, with immediate and cascading effects on fish, birds and the entire food chain.”
Protesters held signs depicting pink flamingos and loggerhead sea turtles and demonstrated in the sanctuary outside the newly built fence. Environmental groups have also documented heavy equipment on beaches, hilltop drills and patrolling security guards, but it’s unclear whether they are related to the Kushner-backed development.
This week, large-scale protests were held in the capital for several days, with citizens chanting “Albania is not for sale”.
BirdLife told CNN it is not opposed to all development on its coastline, arguing that other areas with abandoned buildings or previous urban development are also good candidates for regeneration.
“Some kinds of nature can coexist with some kinds of development, but it’s impossible to turn an entire island or delta into a de facto city,” Brunner said. “If you physically remove a habitat, everything that lives in that habitat disappears.”
Environmental groups and the media have not seen permits or planning documents for the project, so it is difficult to know exactly how many buildings are planned and in which parts of the protected area. But in a podcast interview, Ivanka Trump emphasized the scale of the project.
“Hotels, resorts, wellness, all of that. The scale of it is almost mind-boggling,” she said, later adding that at the heart of it all was “community.” “You can’t just impose a country or culture on someone. To do it in a beautiful, sensitive, meaningful way, you have to first understand it.”
CNN’s Vasco Cotobio, Isa Soares and Olivia Burian contributed to this report.
