“Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark. And all the people shall say, Amen.”
That ancient command was read aloud to an entire nation because civilization itself depends on one unglamorous thing, secure title to land. Strip that away and everything built on top of it, commerce, family inheritance, the rule of law, collapses into a contest of force and forgery.
Which brings us to the Adriatic coast of Albania, where Jared Kushner’s multi-billion-dollar resort project just collided with a problem older than any government in Europe.
According to case files reviewed by Reuters, Albania’s anti-corruption and organized crime agency, known as SPAK, suspects that Artur Shehu, the Miami-based businessman who sold a strip of coastline to the resort’s land entity in April, built his real estate holdings on forged ownership documents.
Prosecutors have issued a warrant for Shehu’s arrest, accusing him and associates of trafficking South American cocaine into European ports and laundering the proceeds through property. Prosecutors wrote in the files that there are reasonable suspicions, based on evidence, that the assets were acquired through forged documents.
Shehu denies everything. His lawyer, Kujtim Cakrani, told Reuters his client is neither a drug trafficker nor a forger, that the family has held the land since Ottoman times, and that it is widely assumed in Albania that prosecutors answer to political and business interests.
That last claim deserves attention rather than dismissal. Albania is a country where the deputy prime minister was charged with corruption last year and a socialist parliamentary majority blocked her arrest. Skepticism about prosecutorial independence there is not paranoia, it is pattern recognition. Shehu remains an accused man, not a convicted one.
What the Coverage Wants You to Miss
Here is the part the headline writers hope you will skim past. The 200 pages of case files make no allegation of wrongdoing against Kushner, against Sazan Real Estate Development, against Albania Land Development, or against any investor in the project. Reuters found no indication that anyone involved knew of any suspicions about Shehu when the land changed hands. A SPAK spokesperson separately told CBS News that its investigation does not concern any company associated with Kushner.
The legacy press will nonetheless run this as a Kushner scandal, because a Trump family name in a headline about cocaine and forgery is irresistible, and because the standard applied to this family has never been the standard applied to anyone else.
When the Biden family’s business entanglements ran through actual foreign officials, we were told there was nothing to see. When a Kushner-backed entity buys land from a seller who later comes under investigation, with no allegation the buyers knew anything, it becomes an international story within hours. Note the machinery and adjust your reading accordingly.
The Real Story Is Property Rights
None of that means Americans should wave this away, because underneath the tabloid framing sits an issue we claim to care about more than anyone. Residents of the village of Zvernec have been contesting Shehu’s claim to this land in Albanian courts for more than a decade. Last month a dozen of them showed Reuters their own title deeds and tax records, and their lawyer says they intend to seek a court order halting the project. One landowner, Nikolin Markpalaj, told Al Jazeera that what is happening in his country is madness.
If those villagers hold legitimate title, then no resort, however gorgeous the renderings Kushner posted in 2024, has a right to rise on their land. That is not an anti-development position. It is the development position, because no serious investor builds billions of dollars of hotels, villas, and yacht jetties on a foundation of disputed deeds.
Albania’s land records have been a shambles since communism collapsed, competing claims date back generations, and the government of Prime Minister Edi Rama has bulldozed ahead anyway, declaring the project beautiful and promising it will proceed regardless.
“Regardless” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A government that backs a foreign-linked megaproject regardless of unresolved title disputes and an active forgery investigation is not defending investment, it is advertising that property rights in Albania are negotiable, which is precisely why the country stayed poor for so long.
Ivanka Trump has said she and her husband conceived the resort after spotting the coastline from a yacht. It is a fine origin story. But the lesson of this week is that in countries where the landmark can be moved with a forged paper and a friendly ministry, the view from the yacht is the easy part.
The Kushner team’s smartest move now is the boring one, let the Albanian courts sort the title completely, publicly, and to the satisfaction of the villagers holding those old deeds, before another shovel touches the sand. Build on clean title or do not build at all.
And all the people shall say, Amen.
