Shadows are lengthening over Jared Kushner’s ambitious and much-discussed investment project in Albania, after it emerged that one of the people who sold land worth around $240 million to the consortium behind the scheme is, according to The Wall Street Journal, facing serious charges over alleged involvement in an international drug trafficking and money laundering ring.

At the same time, local residents have long insisted that parts of the land earmarked for development actually belong to them, and had warned Kushner’s side not to proceed while the legal disputes remained unresolved.

At the centre of the case is Miami-based Albanian businessman Artur Shehu, 60, who denies both the drug trafficking charges and the claims that he acquired land illegally. His lawyer, Kujtim Cakrani, insists that his client is simply a member of a large landowning family and that all of his business dealings were lawful.

The Flamingo Drive villa and the drug trafficking claims

According to Miami property records, Shehu owns, together with his wife, a former Albanian television personality, a 4,000 square foot (about 370 square metre) home on Flamingo Drive in Miami Beach.

His path to South Florida runs through some particularly turbulent decades back home. Isolated and impoverished during the Cold War, when its government severed ties with both the Soviet Union and China, Albania fared little better in the post-communist 1990s. The country was plagued by political instability, organised crime, a shrinking population and a huge pyramid investment scheme that nearly plunged it into civil war.

Amid the chaos, Shehu emerged as an entrepreneur, with his assets eventually including a hotel in the troubled port city of Vlora.

He subsequently drew the attention of Albania’s anti-drug police, as well as Italian authorities, who suspected him of working with the Italian mafia, trafficking marijuana and smuggling migrants to Italy by speedboat, according to Dritan Zagani, one of the former Albanian state police officers who ran the related investigations.

From a bar shooting to American citizenship

One day in 1999, according to Zagani, police rushed to a bar following reports of gunfire. There, they learned that Shehu had been involved in an exchange of fire with a rival gang. “After that, Artur disappeared,” Zagani said.

Shehu’s lawyer has said his client was attacked by pro-communist gangs because of his anti-communist views, and that the authorities’ investigation was politically motivated. Neither the Italian nor the Albanian inquiry led to charges being filed.

Shehu resurfaced in Miami. He moved to the United States in 2001 and was granted asylum after citing attacks by communist gangs that killed his uncle and brother, Cakrani said. He eventually obtained American citizenship, but kept up his ties to Albania, building up a property portfolio there.

Shehu was back in the authorities’ sights in 2012, when Italian prosecutors sought his arrest as part of a wider case involving an Italian crime family. Shehu co-owned a gelateria in Albania with an Italian mobster, who deposited more than 1 million euros (about $1.3 million at the time) with him, according to an Italian court ruling. Shehu also rented the man space in a building for a casino, prosecutors said.

The Italian judge, however, rejected the arrest request, saying there was insufficient evidence tying Shehu to any illegal activity. Cakrani stressed that Shehu’s role was limited strictly to that of a landlord.

Even so, Shehu kept surfacing in drug investigations. European authorities, as part of surveillance operations, tracked him to Monaco alongside suspected traffickers, according to Albanian prosecutors, who also obtained photographs of him from 2019 in Mallorca, where he attended a meeting with a suspected senior mafia boss who was later arrested. Shehu was not charged in connection with these investigations, and his lawyer has made clear that he had no legal problems in any European country other than Albania and that he was only ever party to lawful business dealings.

The $5 billion plan

Kushner, son-in-law of former US President Donald Trump, has turned in recent years to major real estate projects in the Balkans, betting that tourism and property prices in the region will keep rising. He had previously tried to press ahead with a large investment on state land in central Belgrade, but the Serbian scheme collapsed after weeks of protests and criminal charges against a minister who had pushed through the relevant approvals. Kushner withdrew from that project in December.

In Albania, however, the plan has advanced much further. The total investment is estimated at $5 billion and has the backing of Prime Minister Edi Rama, who describes it as a major foreign investment that will boost the economy.

Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, the daughter of Donald Trump, first became interested in Albania after a yacht trip in the Mediterranean, during which they visited Sazan, a former military outpost briefly held by Greece before the First World War, lying off the Albanian coast. “We swam to the island. We hiked. We were just captivated,” Ivanka Trump has said.

Kushner went on to reach an agreement with Rama to develop Sazan, and began drawing up plans with American developer Asher Abehsera. Their interest soon extended to Zvërnec, roughly eight kilometres away, an untouched coastal area where sea turtles nest and sheep graze.

The $125 million paid to Shehu

The Kushner-backed consortium has already paid out more than $240 million in total for land bought from private owners, including Shehu.

According to prosecutors investigating the money laundering case, a company linked to the project, which includes a large Qatari investment group belonging to the Al-Khayyat family, with whom Kushner has partnered since 2022, paid Shehu 110 million euros (about $125 million) in April for his land in Zvërnec.

The case is complicated by the fact that this particular plot has been at the centre of a legal dispute for years.

Zvërnec residents say that after the fall of the communist regime, their families reclaimed land that had been nationalised by the state. Since the mid-2000s, however, they began discovering that local authorities had recognised Shehu’s rights over the same plots. As they pursued their own claims, villagers and other claimants found that Shehu had exploited the country’s weak judicial system to amass much of the land in Zvërnec, using a lawyer to present historical documents purporting to show that his ancestor, Seit Shehu, had once owned the property.

In one case, a court found that an Ottoman-era property document had been mistranslated, with the name of the original owner replaced by that of Shehu’s ancestor. A lawyer and an archivist were later convicted over offences linked to the falsified documents, although the lawyer’s case is being retried. “The falsity of this document has been proven,” Albania’s Supreme Court ruled.

Shehu’s side maintains that other, legitimate documents prove his family’s ownership.

Allegations of an international cocaine ring

The situation changed dramatically in June, when European investigators from Spain, Belgium and other countries handed over evidence to SPAK, Albania’s Special Structure Against Corruption and Organised Crime.

Prosecutors secured arrest warrants for Shehu and 19 other people, whom they consider members of a large European drug trafficking ring. Shehu is charged with money laundering and participation in a structured criminal organisation, with prosecutors describing him as having played a leading role in the network.

According to prosecutors, the ring was present across the entire cocaine supply chain, from production in Ecuador, where the drug was concealed in shipments of fruit, soya and sugar, to transport through Dutch ports, then processing and distribution across Europe.

The proceeds are alleged to have been returned to Albania via cryptocurrency and cash, some of it carried by bus, before being laundered through property investments. Shehu’s lawyer categorically rejects the allegations and says his client’s dealings were exclusively lawful.

Prosecutors have frozen the money Shehu received from the land sale.

The land disputes were no secret locally. In September 2024, residents sent a letter to Kushner’s company asking it not to take any action that could violate the village’s property rights while the disputes remained unresolved.

Abehsera said at the time that the company had no interest in developing any land that did not legally belong to it.

The consortium now says Albania’s judicial system is the appropriate forum for resolving questions over ownership and past transactions. It says it is aware of the allegations against the land’s seller but is not itself under investigation, and continues to consider the purchases lawful.

The video that brought thousands onto the streets

In late April, the company put up fencing and barbed wire around parts of the environmentally protected peninsula.

When residents gathered to protest, private security guards sealed off the area. One guard was filmed hitting a resident on the neck and then dragging him along the beach, while police stood nearby. The company condemned the incident, blaming an external security contractor.

The video went viral and triggered a wave of protests. Demonstrators began gathering in Tirana holding placards bearing images of Kushner, Trump and flamingos, as the protests broadened into a wider outcry over corruption and unchecked development, which participants have dubbed the “Flamingo Revolution”.

Despite the backlash, the project is continuing and is currently going through environmental assessment, a step required before government approval for construction can begin. Zvërnec residents, for their part, fear they will permanently lose the land they consider theirs and be displaced once again. They have the support of European Union officials and celebrities such as Dua Lipa, but the $5 billion project continues to enjoy the strong backing of Albania’s prime minister, who hails it as a major foreign investment that will boost the country’s economy.