Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald J. Trump, confirmed on Friday that he is making major real estate deals in Albania and Serbia, the latest example of the former president’s family doing business abroad, even as Mr. Trump pursues. to return to the White House.
Mr. Kushner’s plans in the Balkans appear to have come about in part through relationships built while Mr. Trump was in office. Mr Kushner, who was a senior White House official, said he was working on the deals with Richard Grenell, who served briefly as deputy director of national intelligence under Mr Trump and also as ambassador to Germany and special envoy in the Balkans.
One of the proposed projects would be to develop an island off the coast of Albania into a luxury tourist destination.
A second — with a planned luxury hotel and 1,500 residential units and a museum — is in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, on the site of the long-vacant former Yugoslav Army headquarters destroyed in 1999 by NATO bombing, according to a Serbian lawmaker. and Mr. Kushner’s company.
These first two projects both involve territories now controlled by governments, which means an agreement with foreign governments will need to be finalized.
A third project, also in Albania, will be built on the Zvërnec peninsula, a 1,000-hectare coastal area in the south of Albania that is part of the resort community known as Vlorë, where several hotels and hundreds of villas will be built. in the plan.
Mr. Kushner’s involvement will be through his investment firm, Affinity Partners, which has $2 billion in funding from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, among other foreign investors. In a statement, an Affinity Partners official said it had not been determined whether Saudi funds might be part of any project Mr. Kushner is considering in the Balkans.
“We’re very excited,” Mr. Kushner said in an interview. “We haven’t finalized those deals, so they may not happen, but we’ve been working hard and we’re very close.”
Mr. Kushner founded his investment firm after leaving his job at the White House as a senior adviser. He took advantage of the relationships he had forged in the administration’s Middle East negotiations, which included a close relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Kushner ended up securing $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and hundreds of millions more from investment funds in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. He has taken few public steps so far to actually invest large chunks of that money.
Mr. Grenell also made valuable connections while in government, including some that appear to have given the Kushner team an inside track on investments in the Balkans. During his time in the Trump administration, Mr. Grenell worked to resolve disputes between Serbia and Kosovo.
These discussions indirectly involved Albania, as most citizens of Kosovo are Albanians and Albania plays a role in regional discussions.
Mr. Grenell has remained close to Mr. Trump since the former president left office, defending him publicly and speaking to him regularly.
Mr. Grenell has said privately that he hopes to be secretary of state in a second Trump administration, according to a person who discussed the matter with Mr. Grenell and who described the conversations on condition of anonymity.
Mr. Grenell, in an interview, declined to mention on the record any interest in a possible position as secretary of state. He said only that he had not decided whether he would join any future Trump administration.
Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, which has tracked business deals it deemed conflicts of interest during the Trump administration, said those planned deals were unethical and would only raise new questions for the Trump family, particularly if Mr. Trump is re-elected. .
“At this point in the election cycle Jared Kushner should freeze any new investment plans,” Mr. Weisman said. “This particular investment scheme appears to embody the worst of all the corrupt tendencies of the Trump administration and the Trump family.”
The Trump family’s involvement in foreign trade deals became a major target during Mr. Trump’s tenure, with critics eventually suing and alleging that the family illegally benefited from foreign payments — referred to as emoluments in the Constitution — while Mr. Trump was in power. Those cases were dismissed as moot by the Supreme Court when Mr Trump left office, but could be reopened if he returned to the White House.
Since leaving office, Mr. Trump has become a partner in a development project in Oman, a deal struck by a Saudi real estate company with ties to the Saudi government.
Mr. Kushner rejected any suggestion that he is getting preferential treatment because of his time in government or that any of the work is connected to the former president.
“No one is ‘handing’ me deals,” said Mr. Kushner, who insisted he had no plans to return to Washington if his father-in-law were to win the presidency again. “I operate quite meticulously and these investments will create great value for local communities, our partners and our investors.”
Representatives for Mr. Trump did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment.
Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, have largely stayed out of Mr. Trump’s political activities since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill.
The New York Times first approached Mr. Kushner on Wednesday morning about his future projects in the Balkans. He initially declined to answer questions, responding only after revealing his plans to Bloomberg News on Friday.
Mr Kushner and Mrs Trump have visited Albania twice since Mr Trump left office. They traveled to the country with Mr Grenell and even met the Prime Minister of Albania.
Mr Kushner and Ms Trump, along with Mr Grenell, have focused in part on Sazan, a Mediterranean island south of Albania that until the end of the Cold War was used by the Soviet Union and its communist-led government of Albania as a secret military base for submarines. The plan is to build a luxury hotel and villas on the island.
The rugged two-square-mile island has hundreds of Cold War-era bunkers and tunnels designed to withstand nuclear attacks and has been largely empty since the end of the Soviet Union. But it is just half an hour by speedboat from Avlona, ​​a resort destination in southern Albania, where the Saudi government is already spending money to improve electricity and other public utilities to help promote tourism in Albania.
Mr. Grenell, a former Fox News contributor and media consultant, works closely with Mr. Kushner and his investment firm.
Mr Grenell has spoken of his efforts to turn the relationships he built in Albania and elsewhere in the Balkans into personal gains. He has returned to the region several times and met with hotel industry executives as well as Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama.
“We are looking for opportunities for investment through foreign investment in the Balkans, but more specifically in Albania, and the Albanian coast is wonderful,” Mr. Grenell said in one of the interviews he did in Albania on TV and newspapers. last three years.
Day-to-day management of the projects will be handled by Asher Abehsera, a California-based real estate developer who has done projects in Brooklyn with Mr. Kushner and who traveled to the Balkans with Mr. Grenell and Mr. Kushner to check the development sites, Mr. Kushner said.
Mr Grenell added in a nearly 90-minute television interview in Albania last year that there was nothing wrong with making his deal because he was now out of government. “I’m working on projects, private equity projects, that I can make money on,” he said. “No one should ever apologize for wanting to make money.”
Last July, Mr. Grenell, along with Ivanka Trump and Kushner, also met with Mr. Rama in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and were photographed together.
Mr. Rama has been pushing for nearly a decade to open Sazan to redevelopment as a tourist destination, as well as look for other ways to attract foreign investors to Albania to expand its tourism economy.
Auron Tare, a former member of parliament in Albania who has served as an adviser to Mr. Rama, took Mrs. Trump and Mr. Kushner to Sazan Island in 2021 as part of a visit to Albania that included a yacht cruise and helicopter trip to coast.
Mr. Tare, in an interview, said he discussed with Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump the desire to develop Sazan, but to do so in a way that would preserve its history and environment.
Mr. Kushner and Mr. Grenell work closely with a billionaire Albanian business executive named Shefqet Kastrati and his son, Musa Kastrati. Their investments include a concession to operate Tirana’s international airport, a chain of gas stations in Albania and hotels and other businesses, according to business associates and Mr. Kushner.
“They helped us understand the cost of building and how to operate locally,” Mr. Kushner said in an interview.
In October 2022, Shefqet Kastrati bought a $7.5 million home in Indian Creek, Florida, according to land records, a property near where Mrs. Trump and Mrs. Kushner now live. The Kastratis family also last year bought a hotel in the Brickell section of Miami for $55 million from the Qatari royal family.
Moussa Kastratis, in an interview, said the role his family company would play in Mr. Kushner’s Albanian projects was not yet clear, but that it would likely involve helping build some of the complexes. Mr Kastrati also confirmed that he visited Mar-a-Lago, Mr Trump’s Florida resort and home, in December 2022 with Mr Grenell and also briefly met Mr Trump when the former president as they ate dinner. Mr Kastratis said he had not discussed the potential deal with Mr Trump.
Mr Grenell has repeatedly taken to Instagram and other social media accounts to promote tourism in Albania and praise Mr Rama, the prime minister.
“I support Rama’s vision for the Balkans,” Mr Grenell said in a televised interview in 2021 after meeting another hotel industry executive in Albania, Irfan Hysenbelliu. “I love Albania and I invite American investors to the country.”
The Saudi Arabian government recently announced that it was looking for ways to increase its investment in Albania, first helping to build water, electricity and sewage services next to beach areas in Avlona, ​​which is the starting point for Sazan and where a new international airport is already being built. He has said he wants to invest up to $300 million in the country.
Earlier this month, Saudi officials traveled to Albania to announce the creation of what they called the Saudi Arabian Business Council “to forge a new economic partnership between the two countries,” including tourism projects. The group’s Saudi president, Abdulrahman Al-Mufarreh, did not respond to requests for comment.
Michael S. Schmidt contributed to the report.
