On the ground: civil unrest puts painter Edi Rama’s Albanian canvas into perspective

Protests in Tirana over offshore-financed development deal reveal an Albania that the longstanding leader’s foreign admirers won’t see.

DALAN BEACH–The video is only a few seconds long. A protester confronts private security at a 30 May demonstration against a controversial tourism development at Zvërnec on the Albanian coast, connected to the Trump family. A guard charges forward, thumping his fist into the face of the man who was then dragged off the beach. Within hours the footage had ripped across Albanian social media.

Before the protesters arrived, I had set up my drone to film the sweeping, breathtaking landscape that had only been fenced off a week or so earlier to establish a southern boundary to the project, which is set to cover hundreds of hectares. Architectural simulations show an ultra-luxury resort. Given its position on the Adriatic and Albania’s comparative low prices, such a business here could attract tens of thousands of foreign tourists a year, putting Albania on the European map of package holidays on a par with Greece and Turkey.

In the following days, thousands of protesters poured into central Tirana, Albania’s capital, famed for its brutalist buildings and burgeoning cocktail bars. They came waving national flags and blow-up flamingos, screaming from megaphones and shouting slogans. More drones buzzed overhead and the mood was energetic and angry. For many, the confrontation at Zvërnec had become a symbol of their wider frustration: the government had stopped listening and the political class no longer cared.

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama understands the power of images better than most politicians. Much has been made of his creativity – he worked as a visual artist before entering government, and he has developed a reputation amongst European politicians as a charming moderniser. As leader since 2013, he transformed drab institutional buildings into brightly coloured canvases and rebranded Albania as a destination of sun, culture and investment. He has tied his political project to the Zvërnec development, which is mooted to bring in $4 billion – a significant chunk of Albania’s $33 billion GDP.

Perhaps sensing that the public were in open revolt over the Zvërnec fracas, Rama went on the offensive, calling for prosecution of the guard and lambasting his critics as wanting Albania’s economic failure. Following days of protest, he raised his voice in an interview on CNN in which he spoke of a “hybrid war”.

In the crowd, Vladimir Karaj, a Tirana-based investigative reporter, says the protests are “purely spontaneous”, bringing together left wingers, religious conservatives, environmentalists, and nationalists alike.

Rama has sought to discredit the nationalistic component of the protest by claiming it is related to Greece, which he says seeks to undermine Albania’s tourist industry.

“I don’t know if it will hold,” Karaj says about the protests. Someone near us raises a huge American flag, but within minutes it is shouted down. 

The flag hints at one of the complexities in the dispute at Zvërnec. Rama’s opponents are not just decrying the destruction of a protected environmental reserve next to the Adriatic. It is also the opaque nature of the project’s development and ownership.

The government’s argument is that Albania should welcome what it describes as strategic investment, but critics increasingly ask a simple question: strategic for whom? 

Bombshell deal

It has been widely reported that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are set to acquire from the state a former military installation, Sazan island, just across the water from the Zvërnec development. In Kushner’s telling, he and his wife’s first encounter with the island was on a sailing trip in the Adriatic from Montenegro on the boat of friend and British financier Lord Rothschild. Prime Minister Rama joined them on the yacht. Sazan may represent a development challenge, however, in that it is reportedly rife with unexploded WWII ordnance.

The Zvërnec case presses on the bruises of Albania’s Communist history. According to Karaj’s reporting, the land is private, with ownership disputes going back decades. A Miami-based Albanian businessman reportedly linked with organised crime in Italy has been accused by Zvërnec locals of having taken their land.

Another figure hovering over the project is Albania’s top businessman, Shefqet Kastrati, a billionaire whose petrol stations dot the landscape. At a January 2026 meeting in Vlore between Rama, Ivanka Trump and a group of architects, Kastrati’s son Musa was reportedly present. Musa previously indicated to The New York Times that his family may be involved in the project, and one local activist captured a photo of a Kastrati vehicle on-site in May.

It remains unconfirmed whether Kushner is in fact financing the Zvërnec project through his corporate investment vehicle Affinity Partners – although the CEO of its real estate and infrastructure division Asher Abehsera was seen on Albanian television promoting it. Ivanka Trump recently appeared to confirm the family’s involvement.

Qatari money is also reportedly in the mix through a network of shell companies.

Critics question why, if the development is a point of pride and representative of Albania’s future, the ownership is hidden behind a maze of offshore structures. Such disputes raise questions about who benefits in an economy where politics and business are fused. 

Zef Preçi, former Minister for the Economy and director of the Albanian Centre for Economic Research, cites figures showing that over $5 billion circulates outside the banking system, making Albania’s grey market one of the largest in the world relative to GDP. “The injection of illicit money into the economy is truly high”, he said, according to media reports. And according to a 2025 report from the country’s financial intelligence unit, outside of banks the highest proportion of suspicious activity reports were made by notaries – the professionals who legally formalise property purchases. 

There is no evidence of illicit funds backing the Zvërnec project. But whether fairly or not, the ownership opacity has fed into more familiar domestic criticism of the Prime Minister: that he has not been careful about the company he keeps in pursuit of investment.

In 2020, Albanian journalist Artan Hoxha published a photograph showing Rama alongside Ardian Çapja, a smartly-dressed businessman from the city of Elbasan. A couple of years later, Çapja was sentenced to life imprisonment for a 2012 murder.

Albanian organized crime groups associated in public reporting with Elbasan have been responsible for large-scale cocaine imports into Britain and other Western countries.

Later in 2020, photographs were released of a businessman named Luftur Hysa, emerging from Rama’s office. Media labelled Hysa as a money launderer for Mexico’s notorious Sinaloa cartel. Rama said he and Hysa – a former member of the German parliament also appears to have been present at the meeting – were having a discussion about a casino licence in the coastal city of Vlore.

Hysa rejected the cartel association, but in 2025 the US Treasury Department said in a sanctions designation against him that the “Hysa Organized Crime Group […] is believed to operate with the consent of the Sinaloa Cartel”. 

After the Hysa sanctions, the head of the Albanian Democratic Party and government opponent Sali Berisha sought to capitalise, saying Rama had “declared one of the members of the most powerful drug cartel in the world a strategic investor”. Berisha himself was sanctioned by the US authorities in 2021 and UK in 2022 “involvement in corrupt acts”. Berisha has challenged the designations.

Albania was also home to  the strange case of former FBI New York counterintelligence chief Charles McGonigal, who had met with Rama, before pleading guilty in 2024 to charges that  he concealed illegal payments of $225,000 from former Albanian intelligence officer Agron Neza (as well as violating Russia sanctions by working with Oleg Deripaska). Neza and McGonigal reportedly met several times with Rama in 2017 and 2018. While it may be a strange coincidence, it is worth noting that prior to his imprisonment McGonigal served as chief security officer to Aman Group, a hotel company which has been in talks with Kushner regarding the Sazan project, according to a Bloomberg report.

None of these episodes proves anything untoward about the Zvërnec project, but they help explain why protests go beyond environmental concerns or planning disputes. Often, the story told about Albania to foreign counterparts by the Prime Minister does not align with the informal networks that seem to underpin major domestic economic decisions. 

International amnesty

And yet, outside Albania, Rama’s carefully cultivated image continues to circulate with help from well-placed friends. Perhaps his most prominent champion in Britain is former Tony Blair spin doctor and podcaster, Alastair Campbell, who has supported Rama on political campaigns. Rama gifted him with a drawing of Campbell on horseback holding a sword and an iPhone. 

Rama spoke on Campbell’s and Tory Rory Stewart’s podcast, and the interview appears to have pleased the Albanian, who posted the transcript in full on the Prime Ministerial Office’s website. Campbell and Stewart also drew outrage from many in Albania’s neighbour Serbia recently for giving a pillow-puffing interview to the country’s leader, Alexandar Vucic, at a time when Serbia’s population is also increasingly mutinous and protests are being brutally suppressed.

Elsewhere, Campbell has been a defender of key Rama Socialist Party ally Erion Veliaj, the Tirana mayor who has been under investigation from the country’s chief anti-corruption prosecution unit, SPAK, over a series of charges including money laundering, bribes and improper handling of public tenders. Veliaj hired big London law firm Mishcon de Reya to represent him.

In Britain, the discussion over Albanian migration is often focused on the high proportion of imprisoned Albanians. While this is factually true, the policy debate could also benefit from focusing more closely on why criminal groups are motivated to send young men to London in particular.

In 2022, Rama’s cabinet proposed an “amnesty” on undeclared assets worth up to two million euros in exchange for a 5-10 per cent tax. There would be no need to reveal the source of the assets. The proposal was dropped after the benefits it would have brought to criminal gangs were pointed out. An earlier proposal was retracted following pressure from the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund.

This hasn’t stopped Albanian ministers giving speeches in London advocating for such an amnesty on off-books money made in the UK to be returned and invested. A form of the law has since passed, which has been criticised by government opponents as an “amnesty in disguise”.

The protests in Zvërnec have not produced a unified political reaction. But they have shown the fragile political reality in Albania: neither the country’s long-standing political figures, nor the image the government presents to foreign audiences, enjoy public confidence.

The Zvërnec controversy has now moved beyond the streets and the offshore balance sheets, into Albania’s anti-corruption institutions, with SPAK announcing an investigation into the project. 

In Tirana, the chant was for the country to reject the current system and imprison the country’s two main political leaders: “Rama, n’burg! Berisha, n’burg!”

Against that backdrop, what remained to do for your correspondent was to pack up the drone, download the footage, and find a cold bottle of Birra Korça to drink by the beach while typing this report. When the West’s thirsty legions of consumers will enjoy the same thing in Albania’s planned Zvërnec resort, is an open question.

Roger Hamilton-Martin is a freelance reporter covering financial crime, business and law. He can be reached at roger@reporter.london.

(Thanks as always to B.M. who has helped edit the article.)