On Tuesday, SPAK, Albania’s special prosecutor’s office for organised crime and corruption, announced it had opened a criminal investigation into the land acquisition process behind the Sazan resort project, examining the origin of the funds used to buy coastal titles and how officials managed to bypass the normal public tender system.
The announcement came as thousands of Albanians were already marching through Tirana under the slogan “Albania is not for sale,” four days after heavy machinery had appeared at Zvernec to clear pine trees and dig access routes without residents feeling they had been consulted. Environmental officers from the NGO PPNEA confirmed on the ground that bulldozers had destroyed at least one confirmed sea turtle nest in the protected area.
The Project Now Faces a Legal Test
The project is being led by Atlantic Incubation Partners, linked to Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners fund, and was granted “strategic investor” status by the Albanian government just days before Trump returned to office in January 2025. The planned development covers Sazan Island and a long stretch of the Vjosa-Narta protected wetland near Zvernec, and includes approximately 10,000 hotel rooms and villas managed by Aman Resorts. Rama has referred to a total four-billion-euro project. On 31 May, Ivanka Trump told a podcast she had “discovered” Sazan while sailing off a friend’s boat and described the couple building “a private island.” In a country where Sazan had been public land for generations, that phrasing landed badly.
The Geography Makes the Fight Harder
The project’s location explains the intensity.
The Vjosa-Narta wetland is home to flamingos, monk seals, dolphins, and sea turtle nesting sites. It is Albania’s only flamingo breeding ground. Sazan Island, 2.2 square miles of former communist military base, sits beside a marine landscape long valued precisely because it was spared mass tourism. Demonstrators carried inflatable flamingos to Rama’s office and held signs reading “Ivanka, go home.” Rama invited protesters to send a twenty-person delegation for talks, a sign that he feels the political pressure even if he has not changed course.
Developers say the resort will follow Albanian and EU environmental rules and promise “responsible stewardship and environmental enhancement.” That language has done little to calm opponents, partly because the planning sequence has already run ahead of public consultation, and partly because the scale of the project is only now becoming clear to residents who learned its full scope after the fact.
Rama Thinks the Politics Are Worth It
Rama’s defence is that elite tourism brings jobs, revenue, and a faster route towards the kind of high-end economy Albania says it wants as it pursues EU accession. He has dismissed some criticism as politically charged and noted that the backlash would be smaller if Kushner did not carry Trump family associations. There is a real political logic there: small states with beautiful coastlines are often tempted to monetise scarcity through luxury rather than scale, and a project of this size can look, from a prime minister’s office, like proof that Albania has entered a more glamorous investment league.
The trouble is that SPAK’s intervention changes the political calculus. What was a protest story is now also a criminal investigation into how land changed hands, how protected status was altered, and whether the process was ever genuinely legal. Albania is deciding whether environmental protection is a real boundary or merely a slower paperwork track for politically favoured projects. Rama may still get his resort. The sharper question is what kind of state he will have taught Albanians to expect when he does.
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