SPAK Seized 195 Million Dollars in the Zvërnec File, Then Released It Within Days

A preventive sequestration order against Albania Land Development, the company holding the coastal land for the resort tied to Jared Kushner and his Qatari partners, was placed on 29 May and lifted by the start of this week. The prosecution has confirmed neither step in public.

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Tirana. The Special Anti-Corruption and Organized Crime Structure froze roughly 195 million dollars held at Banka Kombëtare Tregtare in the name of Albania Land Development, the company that bought the land for the planned tourism resort at Zvërnec, then withdrew the measure after about three days without issuing any public confirmation of the order or its reversal.

The freeze is documented. A banking notification seen by this publication attributes the block to a preventive sequestration registered as order 17480, dated 29 May 2026, against Albania Land Development SHPK, and records that the instruction reached the bank from the relevant authority and was processed through its head office. The reversal was first reported by WebLajm and carried by Shqiptarja and the news agency Droni, which write that the prosecution lifted the seizure at the start of this week after reassessing the file, leaving the deposited sum usable again. SPAK has made no statement on either action.

The seizure sits inside an investigation that opened weeks ago into the property titles around Zvërnec. SPAK is examining what it treats as an organized scheme to alter, transfer and appropriate land ownership in the protected coastal zone, according to investigative reporting by Klodiana Lala and others. The figure the prosecution appears to be building the case around is Artur Shehu, who lives in the United States and is suspected of a leading role in the alleged scheme. One of Albania Land Development’s administrators, Redi Struga, has been searched by agents of the National Bureau of Investigation acting on SPAK’s order. Struga is described in the reporting as the intermediary between the company and the Qatari investors, and as having sold the underlying land before being installed as an administrator with limited signing authority. He is reported to have acquired some of the parcels from other holders, including a company identified as SERE.

The corporate architecture behind the project runs in layers that the controversy has tended to collapse into a single name. Albania Land Development is the Albanian vehicle that holds the Zvërnec land and whose accounts were frozen. The capital behind it comes from the Qatari brothers Moutaz and Ramez Al-Khayyat, principals of the UrbaCon construction group, who are partners of Jared Kushner. For the Albanian operation they are reported to have registered a branch of Urbacon Trading and Contracting and then a separate structure, Sazan Holding. Kushner’s own formal standing is narrower than the public argument suggests. His company received strategic investor status in December 2024 for a luxury resort on the island of Sazan, granted by the Strategic Investment Committee that Prime Minister Edi Rama chairs. On Zvërnec specifically, Rama said this week that Kushner has not applied for strategic investor status.

The money the prosecution touched is the operating core of the project. The Al-Khayyat brothers had transferred about 195 million dollars to Banka Kombëtare Tregtare to fund the land purchase and the first works, part of an investment that public statements put at around four billion euros, the largest ever declared in Albania and not only in tourism. The brief intervention against those accounts, placed and lifted across a single long weekend, put that figure in question for as long as it lasted.

Rama has narrated the episode in public while the prosecution has stayed mute. He defended the project and said it will not stop while he is prime minister. Asked about the seizure of Albania Land Development’s account, he called the decision arbitrary, said the investors’ funds had been shown to be legal, and drew a distinction between a part of SPAK that legitimately investigates the origin of a property, which he said he welcomes, and what he called self appointed spokespeople inside the institution who circulate half truths. The posture is doubled: the head of government endorses the property inquiry and brands the financial measure illegitimate in the same breath.

The investors on the Kushner side have answered with restraint. Responding to Radio Free Europe, Asher Abehsera, chairman of Sazan Real Estate Development, said the company respects the ongoing public and institutional processes and is ready to proceed as they unfold. He framed the project around responsible stewardship, environmental improvement and jobs, and described it as a chance to build what he called a world class destination and one of the largest private investments in the region’s history.

On the ground the dispute is older than the seizure. Protests against the works at Zvërnec, inside the Pishë Poro-Nartë protected landscape, began last week and continued on Tuesday in front of the government building in Tirana, with calls to cancel the project and for Rama to resign. Residents, citizens and civil society groups have raised concerns over the environmental impact, the ownership of the land and the transparency of the investment, and environmental organizations have opened an online petition. Kushner had set out his ambitions for the area in March 2024, when he spoke of building hotels and hundreds of villas at Zvërnec.

Struga’s record adds weight to the prosecution’s interest in him. His engineering firm InfraKonsult was the designer and supervisor on the Librazhd to Prrenjas road segment that collapsed in February, severing the southeast of the country for days and inflicting heavy economic damage, a file that already placed his name in public scrutiny before Zvërnec.

What the prosecution has done leaves a sequence rather than a verdict. An order numbered and dated, a sum frozen, a search of an administrator, and then a reversal that no one at SPAK will put a name to. The investigation into the property titles is live and acknowledged. The seizure of the money was real enough to reach a bank’s books. The decision to release it within days, taken in silence while the head of government called the original measure arbitrary, is the part of the Zvërnec file that now requires an explanation the prosecution has not given.