Belgrade Was the Warning Albania Ignored
Before Sazan Island, Jared Kushner's Serbian tower deal collapsed into forged documents and criminal charges — a preview nobody heeded.
The Sazan Island fiasco did not come out of nowhere. It came out of Belgrade, where Jared Kushner's playbook — foreign government hands over prime land on sweetheart terms to the American president's son-in-law — had already run once and ended in a courtroom. Anyone paying attention had a full dress rehearsal of what happens when Affinity Partners goes shopping in the Balkans.
The Serbian project was audacious by design. Kushner's firm struck a deal to redevelop the former headquarters of the Yugoslav army in central Belgrade — the gutted General Staff building famously bombed by NATO in 1999 — into a Trump-branded luxury hotel and residences. The site is a national scar and a national landmark. The terms were extraordinary: reporting indicates the Serbian government agreed to hand Affinity a 99-year lease, for free, on some of the most valuable real estate in the capital. In exchange, the government committed to strip the complex of its protected cultural status and complete demolition.
That is the same shape as Albania: a monument of the national past, a protective legal designation in the way, a government eager to bulldoze both to please the Trump family. In Belgrade, the machinery to make it happen turned out to be criminal. Prosecutors alleged that officials forged a key document used to lift the building's cultural protection. Serbia's culture minister, Nikola Selakovic, was charged with abuse of office and document falsification and appeared in a Belgrade court in early 2026. The project's foundation was, quite literally, a fake.
Facing corruption charges and sustained street protests, Kushner walked away, withdrawing from the Serbian agreement in late 2025. Affinity's exit was quiet, the way these exits always are — no reckoning, no accountability, just a pivot to the next country willing to play. Weeks and months later, the identical model resurfaced on the Adriatic, this time with Edi Rama's government offering up Sazan.
The pattern is the point. In each case, the deal depends on a foreign government doing something it should not: gifting public land, waiving protections, skipping competitive tenders. In each case, the counterparty's incentive is not a fair market return but leverage over a family with a direct line to the Oval Office. And in each case, the local public — Serbs then, Albanians now — sees the con more clearly than the officials cutting the ribbon.
What Belgrade should have taught everyone is that these projects are not normal commercial development. They are political instruments dressed as hotels. When a government is willing to forge paperwork or rewrite environmental law to seat a Trump-linked resort on protected ground, the "investment" is really a payment, and the property is really a wrapper. The forged document in Serbia simply made the subtext legible.
Albania had every reason to know better. The Serbian collapse was recent, public and criminal. Yet Rama pressed ahead, betting that the goodwill of the American first family was worth more than his country's own EU ambitions and the rule of law he was bending to accommodate it. Only protests and a corruption probe forced a pause.
Kushner will keep looking for the next Belgrade, the next Sazan — a government insecure enough, or transactional enough, to trade its patrimony for access. The warning is on the record. The only open question is which capital ignores it next.
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