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LAST UPDATE | 11 Jun
IF MIKE WHITE, creator of HBO’s hit The White Lotus, is short of inspiration for the next season of his anthology series, here’s a gift of an idea for an origin story. No, really, Mr White, I insist.
A dimwit billionaire couple, lounging around on a fellow billionaire’s yacht in the azure Adriatic waters (which of course they mistake for the Mediterranean) decide to go for a swim. They spot a spectacular subtropical island and swim to one of its pristine beaches.
Barefoot and besotted, they climb to the top of the island, unwittingly dodging tonnes of unexploded ordnance and thousands of nesting vipers en route.
When they get to the top, the view is so spectacular they agree they simply must own it. $1.4 billion (€1.21 billion) and a few shady backroom deals later, their dream comes true. Or does it?….
White is a master of blistering satire about entitled white Americans seeking enlightenment in far-flung seven-star resorts. But even he would be hard-pressed to surpass Ivanka Trump’s breathless account of how she and her husband discovered their very own Love Island.
Or the shady backstory to the sunny acquisition that has led to a shitstorm of epic proportions.
Sometime after Ivanka emerged from the Adriatic Ocean (if you’re thinking Ursula Andress in Dr No rest assured she probably is too) and onto the Sazan shore, Donald Trump won the 2024 Presidential election and the Albanian government hastily green lit their plan to develop Sazan into a retreat for the ultrawealthy, along with a separate $4.7 billion (€4.07 billion) 10,000 hotel room and villa development adjacent to the Narta Lagoon, a pristine stretch of the Adriatic coast.
They were granted ‘strategic investor status’ for both projects, which allowed them to breeze past environmental protection orders and local ownership claims.
Last weekend, private security guards and contractors arrived at and set about fencing off the previously public beach while contractors started tearing up the hitherto protected area, sparking violent clashes with protesters.
This coincided with the release of Ivanka’s podcast with David Senra, where she breathlessly recounts how she ‘found’ the 1400-hectare island, as if she happened upon a treasure in the attic.
Overnight, it seemed as though the whole of Albania was up in arms about the deal. Protests spilled onto the streets of its main cities amid calls for investigations into how the Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama was able to privatise one of its most spectacular stretches of coastline.
The problem is not the prospect of an eco-friendly development that could be a boon to the local economy. Rather, the mix of backroom dealing and the blithe disregard for legitimate local concerns has blown up in Kushner and Trump’s faces.
Since she took a pass at sashaying around the White House during Trump’s second term, Ivanka Trump has been busy asking profound questions online and on podcasts about how to live her most authentic life.
Her Sazan Island adventure represents ‘a reflection and manifestation of how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live, and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that’. Which it doubtless will be – for the 0.00001% who can afford it.
In a separate interview, Kushner said their conversion of the island into the “the ideal resort that I’d want to be at with my family and with my friends.”
It would be remiss not to mention that Trump and Kushner already live on a private island populated exclusively by billionaires. Indian Creek Village, aka Billionaires Bunker, is a man-made 300-acre island with a country club, a golf course and 41 palatial mansions.
It’s accessible only by a bridge that is manned enthusiastically by its own police force — as I discovered when I inadvertently made a wrong turn off Miami’s Bay Drive. Their neighbours include Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Carl Icahn and Tom Brady.
If her Real Housewife of Billionaires Bunker account of how she scampered to Sazan’s summit, surefooted as a bikini-clad mountain goat seems a little improbable, Ivanka Trump is about as reliable a narrator as her father when it comes to spinning yarns – so much so that she and Don Jr were the subjects of a two-year criminal investigation and came perilously close to indictment in 2012 for dodgy dealings related to a Manhattan condominium development.
Kushner and Trump are the ultimate nepo babies, case studies in vacuity and mediocrity. Both of their families’ wealth derives from their initial success as slum landlords, and coincidentally, both of their fathers are convicted felons.
In both cases, their convictions stemmed from their involvement with sex workers, although Charlie Kushner, the current US Ambassador to Paris, upstaged Trump with a spectacularly steamy plot to extort his sister and brother-in-law, which landed him a two-year stretch in a federal prison.
But as Willie Nelson famously observed, you can have shit for brains so long as you get two helpings of luck. And there’s no denying that Jared Kushner got a double helping of luck when it came to his long list of benefactors. A father whose $2.5 million (€2.17 million) donation coincided with his son’s acceptance to Harvard when his sub-average academic grades wouldn’t have guaranteed him a place in the local community college, and a father-in-law whose election as President resulted in a $600 million (€519.98 million) that Kushner managed to accumulate during his stint as Trump’s unpaid White House adviser.
This led to the $2 billion (€1.73 billion) thank you from Mohammed Bin Salman for Kushner’s willingness to utilise his lofty White House perch to smooth out ruffled feathers after the Saudi Crown Prince ordered the abduction and dismemberment of a pesky Washington Post columnist. Which led to funds from other Middle Eastern wealth funds and Eastern European oligarch types that enabled him to set up Affinity Partners, his private equity firm.
Which in turn led to Kushner’s current role as a self-styled property mogul in search of distressed countries or bombed out enclaves he can fix up and flip as luxurious oases of tranquillity.
Adding to the stench of corruption, Richard Grenell, Trump’s former envoy for special missions, who was simultaneously acting as Affinity’s ‘business broker’ introduced Kushner to both the Albanian Prime Minister and Shefquet Kastrati, the local oligarch who was charged with ‘acquiring’ development-adjacent land interests held by villagers.
But there have been a few hiccups along his fast track to multi-billionaire status. During a 2024 interview at Harvard, as Israel was laying waste to Gaza and slaughtering thousands of women and children, Kushner noted that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable …” adding that “It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.”
This chilling endorsement of ethnic cleansing and assorted war crimes seemed to, in Trump’s eyes at least, qualify Kushner for the role of roving peace envoy.
He was promptly put in charge of brokering peace between Israel and Gaza, Russia and Ukraine and more recently Israel, the US and Iran and Lebanon. Not much to write home about on that front, but the flipping of fixer-upper islands and enclaves is continuing apace.
Doing deals with oligarchs and corrupt government officials has proven simple enough. Small impoverished countries are loathe to risk Trump’s wrath by denying his son-in-law or assorted offspring the development sites of their choice.
Hence, the displacement of 4,000 Vietnamese families whose farmland, along with the ancestral graves of their families, has been seized to make way for a $1.5 billion (€1.3 billion) Trump hotel and golf course.
While the Narta Lagoon development tramples the rights of locals and threatens protected species, the Sazan Island acquisition is a more worrying example of how political power and access to vast amounts of capital intrude on the sovereignty of vulnerable states.
The ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran has provided a global wake-up call, prompting geopolitical powers to cast an eye over potential risks should other maritime choke points end up in the wrong hands.
Sazan’s location in the Strait of Otranto, the waterway through which maritime traffic to and from Italy, Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro and Albania reaches the Mediterranean, has long been of interest to Russia and provides the route through which Russian naval ships access the Mediterranean Sea.
Because Albania is a NATO member, it’s regarded as a critically important chokepoint for the alliance.
Selling it off to the highest bidder raises worrying questions, particularly with both Russia and China seeking to increase their footprints in the Balkans and East Mediterranean region.
Despite their gauzy narrative, the Kushners don’t own Sazan Island. Kushner is merely the frontman for a Saudi-Qatari-UAE toehold in the region, with some Calabrian mob connections and local oligarchs thrown in for good measure.
His luxury development could become a $1.4bn (€1.21 billion) Trojan horse – a dual-use paradise for backers with plans that don’t revolve around a seven-star respite from the real world.
Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker.
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