Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former U.S. President Donald Trump, on Saturday announced plans to invest in luxury real estate in Serbia and Albania, including the site of the Yugoslav Army's general staff. The deal was first revealed by a Serbian lawmaker and an article in the Serbian newspaper. "New York Times". "I'm excited to share some early design images for development projects we're creating for the Albanian waterfront and downtown Belgrade," Kushner wrote on the X platform, along with four images of future complexes.
Green opposition lawmaker Aleksandar Jovanovic said on Wednesday that the Serbian government had appointed Infrastructure Minister Goran Vesic to sign a "memorandum of understanding" with two companies linked to Trump's son-in-law's family. Jovanovic said the matter is no secret, but nothing has been signed yet.
A sensitive topic in Serbia, the deal involves the former army headquarters, which was bombed several times in 1999 during the U.S.-led NATO air campaign that ended the Kosovo war. According to Jovanovic, who spoke about the project days before the 25th anniversary of the start of NATO strikes, the government will cede the building and land for 100 years for free. The army site has never been reconstructed, but was declared a protected "cultural property" in 2005. 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 project for Albania is to turn the southwestern island of Sazan, which was once a secret communist military base, into a luxury tourist destination.
"The New York Times notes that Kushner's business partner is Richard Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence who Trump also used as an envoy for the Kosovo-Serbia peace talks. Albania's tourism ministry said in a statement on Saturday that the investor had expressed interest in developing a "tourism project on the island of Sazan" but would be subject to several stages of review before any decision was made. / BGNES, AFP
