Plans to build a luxury resort by the family of US President Donald Trump in the picturesque area of Zvërnec are ignoring the residents of the area and their property rights, while they are facing a long-running legal conflict with controversial businessman Artur Shehu.
Vladimir Karaj | BIRN
Over the course of two cloudy days on January 21 and 22, the picturesque area of Zvërnec on the edge of the Narta lagoon in Vlora turned into the land of Ivanka Trump - the daughter of the president of the United States of America.
The village was surrounded by numerous police forces, while Trump, accompanied by a large group of architects and businessmen, was filmed moving in an escort of high-rise cars through the area.
Ivanka Trump visited the old monastery of St. Mary on the island of Zvërnec twice during her stay, where she took photos and lit candles. She also met several times with Prime Minister Edi Rama, with whom she was filmed during a dinner.
But the main stop was the white sandy beach of Porta Nova, where the group set up tents and spent most of their time.
However, the residents of the village of Zvërnec followed the events on television.
“No one was called,” Kostaq Konomi, the headman of the village of Zvërnec, says angrily. “They stayed there for two or three days, but they wouldn’t let you get close.”
The small community of Zvërnec has been living for years under the tension of losing their properties due to a long-running legal dispute with Artur Shehu – a controversial real estate businessman in Vlora, who has lived in Florida, United States, for two decades.
But the plans of President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his wife, Ivanka Trump, to build a luxury resort in Zvërnec have brought this danger closer.
Residents of the village of Zvërnec, who claim to be the owners of the land on which the investment is planned, complain that they are being excluded from any information and decision-making.
"Why this silence here, I don't know what's going on? It leaves a lot of doubt here, it leaves a lot of doubt," said Konomi, also ironizing the media that in hours of television broadcasts, no one mentioned the residents of the area who have linked their lives to the land.
Asked by BIRN about Kushner and Ivanka Trump's project in Zvërnec, Prime Minister Edi Rama said through a spokesperson that the government was not involved.
“The area in question is private property and the government is not a party to any agreement,” the prime minister said through his press office. “The project will be treated like all other projects that go through the institutional process until they are granted permits,” he added.
Even the Minister of Tourism, Blendi Gonxhe, said that his ministry was not involved in Kushner’s plans to build in Albania. Asked by BIRN about the ownership conflict, representatives of Kushner’s company did not respond by the time of publication of this article.
Project on disputed land
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's projects in Albania include an ultra-luxury resort on the island of Sazan and a second tourist complex in the Zvërnec area.
The Sazan project became official in late 2024, when, shortly before Donald Trump was inaugurated as US president for the second time, the government of Prime Minister Edi Rama granted him strategic investor status. However, the main interest seems to have shifted towards Zvërnec, despite the fact that the project has not yet gone through the bureaucratic approval process.
According to the project made public, the resort is expected to extend from Dajlani beach towards Porta Nova, around a wetland and a dense forest bordering the protected Narta lagoon.
A few days before Ivanka Trump's visit to Vlora, the residents of Zvërnec were alarmed by an announcement from the Vlora Cadastre.
According to documents obtained by BIRN, Artur Shehu had filed a new request with the Cadastre to obtain a “duplicate” ownership certificate for a 51,944 m² forest property – land that residents say lies in the footprint of the project and is currently in court. In the request, Shehu claimed that the document had been lost.
According to Chief Konomi, this request was not simply an administrative procedure, but the next signal that the old conflict with the residents of the area was entering a new phase, due to interest in luxury investments in the area.
Konomi and another resident approached the State Cadastre Agency, requesting the rejection of Shehu's request because the property was in a judicial dispute.
“The property claimed by citizen Artur Shehu is the property of the residents of the village of Zvërnec, which they acquired through Law No. 7501, dated 19.07.1991, 'On Land',” they write.
The issue of lands in Zvërnec, which include pastures, olive groves, agricultural land and wasteland by the sea, is a conflict that illustrates the stagnation in which property rights in Albania have been for years.
The residents have benefited from it based on Law 7501 and have the land use acquisition acts, AMTP, but Konomi says that most were careful to ensure that the divisions after the '90s followed the old borders.
“I took my father's olives,” he says in the courtyard of his house in Zvërnec.
In 2012, residents learned that the same land had also been recognized to the heirs of the Shehu family, with Artur Shehu as one of the beneficiaries.
Alarmed, the residents of Zvërnec banded together and filed a lawsuit in court. Fourteen years later, they are still in court, as the case has been brought back for retrial several times.
The protracted civil conflict over ownership is not the only one.
For the lands in Zvërnec, there are a series of criminal proceedings initiated by the prosecutors of Vlora and Tirana with Shehu's former legal representative as a suspect, which are also still under review in the courts. According to a decision of the Supreme Court, one of the documents used by the Shehu family has been proven to be forged.
For residents, Trump and the architects' visit to Zvërnec would not be grim news if the properties were recognized by them.
"Let them come and invest, they will create jobs for the youth," says a man in his 60s, who also insists that the investment should not be invasive.
Even Konomi expresses surprise that residents who have lived in this area for centuries are not counted.
"Zvërnec, Zvërnec, Zvërnec, Zvërnec is discussed and no one mentions that there are some people there, that there is a property conflict that has been going on since 2006," he said.
Environmental concerns
Beyond ownership conflicts, Kushner's project in Zvërnec faces opposition and criticism from environmental activists, who are concerned about the impact it will have on the protected area and the Narta lagoon – one of the most important habitats for wild bird life in Europe.
According to Taulant Bino, head of the environmental organization AOS, the project risks damaging the most fragile littoral area in Pishë Poro-Nartë as well as the Vjosa Delta.
"Zvërneci is one of the most sensitive coastal areas in the country. Fragile geology, lagoon, dunes, rocks and untouched beaches," an AOS statement said.
Bino raises doubts that the changes to the law on protected areas were intended to establish such resorts within them, which under the previous law were impossible to realize.
"This decision shows why the amendments to the law on protected areas were approved. To pave the way for any kind of investment, in any kind of territory of the protected area, and even more so in protected landscape areas, such as the Poro-Nartë Pine," he said.
For Bino, this is a precedent that will bring about the alienation of the entire coast.
"Investing in Zvërnec is just one step towards urbanizing the entire Albanian coast, because as is happening in Zvërnec, with the same theory it will also happen in other protected areas of Albania, and throughout the Albanian coast," he said.
Asked by BIRN about the concerns raised by environmental organizations, Prime Minister Rama said through a spokesperson that he saw them as an expression of freedom.
"The Prime Minister values every disagreement as an expression of everyone's freedom to have their own opinion," the press office's response states.
