Jared Kushner, son-in-law to former US president Donald Trump, announced Saturday plans to invest in luxury real estate in Serbia and Albania, including the old Yugoslav army headquarters site.
The deal was first revealed by a Serbian MP and New York Times article.
“Excited to share some early design images for development projects we have been creating for the Albanian coast and downtown Belgrade,” Kushner wrote on X, formerly Twitter, along with four images of the future complexes.
Green opposition MP Aleksandar Jovanovic claimed on Wednesday that the Serbian government had appointed Infrastructure Minister Goran Vesic to sign a “memorandum of understanding” with two firms linked to the family of Trump’s son-in-law.
Jovanovic said the matter was no secret but nothing had yet been signed.
A sensitive topic in Serbia, the deal involves the former army headquarters, which was bombed serval times in 1999 during US-led NATO air campaign that brought an end to the Kosovo war.
According to Jovanovic, who spoke about the project days ahead of the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the NATO strikes, the government will cede the building and land for a period of 100 years at no cost.
The army site was never reconstructed, but in 2005 was declared a protected “cultural asset”.
According to the New York Times, the plan is to build a luxury hotel, 1,500 residential units and a museum.
Meanwhile, one part of the Albania project is to transform the southwest island of Sazan — once home to a secret communist military base — into a luxury tourist destination.
Th New York Times noted that Kushner’s business partner is Richard Grenell, a former acting national intelligence director who Trump also used as an envoy for peace talks between Kosovo and Serbia.
Albania’s tourism ministry said Saturday in a statement that the investor expressed interest in developing “a tourism project on Sazan island” but would be subject to several stages of review before any decision was made. (AFP)
