New York Time: Jared Kushner reveals his intention to invest in Albania and Serbia
Jared Kushner, son-in-law of former US President Donald Trump and his former advisor in the White House, confirmed on Saturday his intention to invest in the luxury real estate sector in Serbia and Albania, after a Serbian MP revealed the details of the project in Belgrade and following information reported in an article in The New York Times newspaper.
“I am pleased to share some images of a design developed to develop projects on the coast of Albania and the city center of Belgrade,” Kushner wrote on X.
The four published photos show the architectural design of the real estate complexes intended to be built in the Serbian capital and the coast of Albania.
On Wednesday, Aleksandar Jovanovic, a Serbian lawmaker who defends the environment, confirmed that the Serbian government had assigned the Minister of Construction, Goran Visic, to sign a memorandum of understanding with two companies linked, he said, to the family of Donald Trump’s son-in-law.
The minister, for his part, explained that the matter isn’t a secret, but the memorandum hasn’t been signed yet.
The issue is sensitive in Serbia because it means giving the investor the Yugoslav army headquarters building, which was bombed several times in 1999 during a NATO air campaign led by the United States to end the war in Kosovo.
Yovanovitch, who revealed the project ten days before the twenty-fifth anniversary of the start of the military coalition strikes, explained that the government would give up the building and land for 99 years without compensation.
Although the headquarters was not rebuilt, in 2005 the Serbian government declared the building, which was built in 1965 and destroyed by strikes, a protected “cultural property”.
The project includes building a luxury hotel, 1,500 residential units, and a museum, according to the New York Times.
As for Albania, one of the projects includes transforming its island of Sazan into a luxury tourist destination, according to the newspaper.
This island, located at the entrance to Vlora Bay (southwest), was Albania’s most secret military base during the communist regime (1945-1990).
The New York Times indicated that Kushner’s partner in these projects is Richard Grenell, a close friend of Donald Trump.
Grenell is the former US ambassador to Germany, the former acting director of US intelligence, and the US envoy to push for negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo.
The Albanian Ministry of Tourism stated in a statement on Saturday that the investor expressed to the Investment and Development Agency his desire to develop a tourism project on Sazan Island.
The Ministry of Tourism stressed that the project must go through several stages of review before decisions are made.
