The Tender That Never Existed

Jared Kushner says his partnership paid €230 million for Albanian land, and he has accepted Albania’s final authority over the project. A potential €4 billion investment should not be sacrificed to political agendas in Washington, European newsrooms, or Tirana.

by Maringlen Cara (Tirana)

A senior foreign editor of WELT sat across from Edi Rama in the anteroom of the Prime Minister’s office and asked how the Kushner project had been initiated. In the European Union, he said, one would need a public tender.

Rama answered that even in the EU “you do not need a public tender to invest in a private plot of land.” The owners sell the property or agree to the development. That, he said, is all.

A farmer in Bavaria sells his field to a hotel company. Nobody in Germany asks which ministry ran the bidding. When the company wants to build, it applies for a permit, and nobody runs a competition for that either. The state reads the file and answers yes or no. Every German knows this about Germany. About Albania the same question has been asked for half a year, in one language after another, and the answer is forgotten by the following week.

In September it was The New Yorker, which carried the complaint that Jared Kushner had been given the right to build with no notice to the public and no competitive bidding. On 8 October he answered on his own website, in section nine of a reply in fourteen parts. He wrote that the land at Zvërnec was bought from a private party for €230 million, that lawyers reviewed the title, that he is a minority partner, and that his interest dates from the summer of 2021, when his father-in-law was out of office and nobody could say whether he would ever return.

Only two things could have been awarded at Zvërnec, the land or the right to build on it. The land changed hands between private parties. On the right to build, the record Rama has set out runs against the story. He says the National Territorial Council sent the first project back on 25 September 2024, demanding less construction and protection for the lagoon, and approved a masterplan only after its conditions were met. That approval sets the development area and its planning limits. It does not allow construction to begin. There is no approved architectural project, and the environmental assessment is still running. The complaint describes a gift, and the file shows an applicant who was sent back once, admitted on the state’s conditions, and is still waiting for permission to build.

Kushner accepts all of it in writing. He says the project must pass every Albanian regulatory and environmental procedure, and then he adds a sentence no investor writes if he believes the country is already in his pocket: “Ultimately, Albania will decide whether the project proceeds.”

That decision is open, and it can go against him. Parliament amended the law on protected areas, a public act any citizen may contest. The Narta lagoon lies beside the site, and the assessment will say what may be built near it. A man who has paid for land and then puts in writing that the state may still refuse him is making an offer to a sovereign country, on that country’s terms.

I want this investment to happen. I think the people who keep this story alive want the opposite, and would rather that file were never read. They want the answer given in advance and given somewhere else, in a magazine office in New York or an editorial room in Berlin, as one more round in the quarrel between Donald Trump and those who cannot forgive him. They have found allies in Tirana who would sooner see the project die than see this government sign it. Rama says he told his Democratic friends in America that if they cannot beat Trump at home they should not come to Albania for revenge. I think he is right, and I think the bill lands on us.

The strategic investor status that the headlines attach to Zvërnec belongs to a different place. Decision No. 23 of the Strategic Investment Committee, dated 30 December 2024, granted it to Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC for 45 hectares of Sazan, a public island of 562. That status opens a negotiation and nothing more. Sazan is a barren former military base. The Ministry of Tourism has said that others asked to develop it before and were turned away, and Rama says that even now it has neither a project nor an agreement. The day to judge Sazan is the day somebody signs and pays. Zvërnec is a private peninsula, and for months the paper from the island has been carried across the water to it. The Vlora airport, a concession from December 2019, made the same crossing.

Albania was sealed from the world until 1990. Rama puts income per head at under 3,000 dollars when he took office and near 12,500 today, and the young still leave, because a wage in Tirana does not buy what a wage in Munich buys. Work that pays will bring them home, and that kind of work follows capital that somebody chooses to risk here instead of in Greece or Croatia. Kushner writes that the project could reach about €4 billion and that this country has never had one of its scale. Today that money is a promise. Albania should do everything its laws allow to turn it into wages in Vlora.

Put yourself in the chair of the next investor, who may have no love for Jared Kushner at all. He has watched a buyer pay what the buyer calls one of the highest prices in the region and hire lawyers to check the title. He has read that buyer’s written acceptance that Albanian regulators have the last word, and then, from New York to Berlin, he has read that the same man got it all as a favour. An investor can live with a regulator who tells him no. What he cannot price is a country where yes is reported as a crime before anyone has been asked. So he takes his money to a country where buying a field is still only buying a field.

The American quarrel will end one way or another and the magazines will move on. What stays behind is an idea planted in editors’ heads from Hamburg to New York, that in Albania property and permits are favours the Prime Minister hands out. Albanians lived for more than four decades under a state that treated property exactly so. They know what it costs.

The assessment is not finished. When it is, the answer will come from Tirana, from a government Albanians can vote out and courts they can appeal to. I want that answer to be yes. A country of two and a half million people is not offered four billion euros twice, and it should not let the offer be shot down as a stray round in somebody else’s war.

Maringlen Cara writes on religion, law and public life in Albania and the region. A Catholic and a constitutional conservative, he holds that a church which serves the state stops being a church.