In Albania, U.S. President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner are involved in a major coastal development project that, if completed, will include new hotels, apartments and villas. But according to The Independent, the project is getting a major pushback from environmentalists and activists in the East European country.
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“Albania’s government champions the Adriatic Coast development as a transformative venture for the nation, aiming to boost its high-end tourism sector and support its bid for European Union membership,” explains reporter Zana Cimili in the UK-based Independent. “However, the project, which encompasses an abandoned island and a stretch of seafront on Albania’s southern coast, has sparked criticism from environmental groups and detractors of the long-serving Socialist Prime Minister, Edi Rama.”
According to Cimili, an investment firm “linked to Kushner” has “been granted special investor status by Albanian authorities.”
That coastal area of Albania, Cimili notes, “remained largely underdeveloped” when the country was under a communist dictatorship during the Cold War. Albania was invaded by Benito Mussolini’s Italian fascist forces in 1939 and was later occupied by Nazi Germany, but communists took control of the country after World War 2 in 1946.
For many years, Albania had one of the most repressive communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe. But it transitioned to democracy after the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
In Tirana, Albania’s capital city, environmentalists have been holding large protests against the coastal project associated with Ivanka Trump and Kushner.
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“Since late May,” Cimili reports, “excavators and other heavy machinery have entered the area, opening access routes, digging into the sand, clearing land among pine trees and installing fencing, Environmental groups from Albania and elsewhere in Europe condemned the work, with one prominent local group charging that long-protected habitats are being ‘irreversibly destroyed’…. Albania’s state anti-corruption agency has confirmed it opened an investigation related to the project but has not disclosed details.”
The Independent reporter adds, “The government says the land earmarked for the project is privately owned. But competing claims have emerged questioning the privatization — a common type of legal dispute.”
Prime Minister Rama, according to Cimili, remains committed to project — which he described as “extraordinary,” telling The Independent, “There is no chance for this investment to stop as long as I am here.”
Interviewed by American podcaster David Senra, Ivanka Trump said of the coastal area of Albania, “We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated.”
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