Kushner covets overseas real estate deals while Trump seeks presidency
WASHINGTON>>— Jared Kushner, the sonin-law of Donald Trump, confirmed Friday that he was closing in on major real estate deals in Albania and Serbia, the latest example of the former president's family doing business abroad even as Trump seeks to return to the White House.
Kushner's plans in the Balkans appear to have come about in part through relationships built while Trump was in office. Kushner, who was a senior White House official, said he had been working on the deals with Richard Grenell, who served briefly as acting director of national intelligence under Trump and also as ambassador to Germany and special envoy to the Balkans.
One of the proposed projects would be the development of an island off the coast of Albania into a luxury tourist destination.
A second — with a planned luxury hotel and 1,500 residential units and a museum — is in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, at the site of the long-vacant former headquarters of the Yugoslav army destroyed in 1999 by the NATO bombings, according to a member of parliament in Serbia and Kushner's company.
These first two projects both involve land now controlled by the governments, meaning a deal would have to be finalized with foreign governments.
A third project, also in Albania, would be built on the Zvërnec peninsula, a 1,000-acre coastal area in the south of Albania that is part of the resort community known as Vlorë, where several hotels and hundreds of villas would be built, according to the plan.
Kushner's participation would be through his investment firm, Affinity Partners, which has $2 billion in funding from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment
Fund, among other foreign investors. In a statement, an official with Affinity Partners said it had not been determined whether the Saudi funds might be a part of any project Kushner is considering in the Balkans.
“We are very excited,” Kushner said in an interview. “We have not finalized these deals, so they might not happen, but we have been working hard and are pretty close.”
Kushner set up his investment company after he left his White House job as a senior adviser. He capitalized on relationships he had built in government negotiating in the Middle East, which included a close relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.
Kushner ended up securing the $2 billion from the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia and hundreds of millions of dollars more from wealth funds in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. He has taken few public steps so far to actually invest large chunks of this money.
Grenell also made valuable connections while in government, including some that appear to have given the Kushner team an inside track for investments in the Balkans. During his time in the Trump administration, Grenell worked on resolving disputes between Serbia and Kosovo.
These discussions indirectly involved Albania, as most citizens of Kosovo are ethnic Albanians and Albania plays a role in the regional discussions.
Grenell has remained close with Trump since the former president left office, defending him publicly and speaking to him regularly.
Grenell has said privately that he hopes to be secretary of state in a second Trump administration, according to a person who has discussed the matter with Grenell and who described the conversations on the condition of anonymity.