Exporting the Abraham Accords: The Hidden Network Converging on Albania’s Shoreline

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

A quiet stretch of Albania’s Adriatic coast is being reshaped by two luxury tourism projects: a vast resort planned on the Zvërnec peninsula south of Vlorë, and a 1.4-billion-euro island complex backed by Jared Kushner on nearby Sazan Island. One site lies inside a protected wetland landscape, the other on a decommissioned military island tied to the same coastal ecosystem and tourism frontier, and together they have turned a once obscure corner of the country into a test case for how much of Albania’s coastline can be handed to strategic investors.

The corporate veil: Dutch holdings and hidden Albanian stakes

On paper, the two developments are packaged as separate bets on high-end tourism: one led by Zvërnec South Adriatic Development S.H.P.K. on land the government insists is private, the other by Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC with the Albanian state as shareholder. The ownership filings, the protests at Zvërnec and the strategic-investor status granted to Sazan point toward the same underlying structure: Dutch holding companies, hidden Albanian stakes, Gulf partners and state entities linking the peninsula and the island.

CHART: Ownership chain linking Dutch holding companies, Zvërnec South Adriatic Development and the Sazan project vehicles (Source: Created by Author)

The paperwork on Zvërnec South Adriatic Development S.H.P.K. leads quickly out of Albania. Official extracts list South Adriatic Development as an Albanian company owned by Smart Construction Invest sh.p.k., controlled by businessman Redi Struga, while investor material and media reports say the Zvërnec resort vehicle is owned by Universal Properties Projects B.V. in the Netherlands. Separate Dutch filings place Universal in the same Amsterdam network as Blue Industries Investment Holding B.V. and Dutch Trust Management B.V., companies that also appear in the Sazan structure.

Interestingly, five Albanian ghost shareholders hold 24 percent inside Blue Industries, according to reporting on the beneficial-ownership chain behind the structure. A 24 percent slice is low enough to avoid public disclosure and high enough to preserve real weight inside the company. Foreign investment can be advertised through the Dutch shell while a significant Albanian interest remains out of sight.

DOCUMENT: Corporate Dossier on Blue Industries Investment Holding B.V (Source: Created by Author)
Blue_Industries_Investment_Holding_BV_Report

The chain is simple on paper: Vinogradov and Gyurova sit above Universal, Universal sits above Blue Industries, and Blue Industries sits above Dutch Trust Management. The Dutch names on the filings are only part of the story. The more revealing question is why this structure was chosen and who it allows to stay out of view.

The same Dutch configuration appears again in the larger Sazan project. There, the field expands to include Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC, a vehicle linked to Jared Kushner, and Power International Holding, the Qatari conglomerate associated with the Al-Khayyat brothers. An investigation published by BalkanWeb and BIRN traced Sazan Operations S.H.P.K. and other foreign companies behind the island project back to the same Blue Industries structure and the same 24 percent Albanian bloc.

Separate on paper, intertwined on the ground

Zvërnec and Sazan are sold as separate developments with different land questions and different legal treatment. The paperwork points elsewhere: the same Dutch layer, the same partially hidden Albanian participation, overlapping foreign partners and, on the Sazan side, the Albanian state itself.

The proposed Sazan Island Resort has been valued at around 1.4 billion euros and is intended to turn a decommissioned military island into a high-end tourism complex through a public-private partnership involving state actors. The company behind the Zvërnec peninsula project says its own investment could exceed 4 billion euros, generate more than 10,000 jobs and contribute 3 to 4 percent of Albania’s gross domestic product (GDP) within five years. Numbers on that scale point to more than a pair of resorts. They imply new transport patterns, new access rules, new security arrangements and a different political relationship to the coastline itself.

Prime Minister Edi Rama has tried to keep a distinction between the two projects, insisting that the Zvërnec project stands on private property while Sazan is different because it is state land and the state has sought to be a partner. Legally speaking, that distinction is valid, but in the ownership map, many of the same names still run through both projects.

From local fences to national protests

The demonstrations at Zvërnec are unfolding in the same protected coastal landscape and political moment that frame the push to turn nearby Sazan into an elite destination. The 2026 Zvërnec protests began as local resistance in the villages of Zvërnec and Nartë and widened into a national issue after clashes near the project site drew country-wide attention. Demonstrators in Tirana rallied under the slogan “Albania is not for sale,” marching to the prime minister’s office and casting the fight as a defence of public coastline and protected landscape rather than a narrow dispute over property titles.

By the time the language in the streets turned from property to sovereignty, the conflict had already moved beyond planning law. Fences, guards, scuffles and police action gave the public something concrete to attach to an otherwise technical investment story.

During a May protest in the Portonovo area near Zvërnec, police initiated proceedings against 17 demonstrators after they attempted to block works at the site. Video showing private security personnel pulling a protester into the enclosed zone led to the revocation of the licences of two security firms, Myrto Security and Major Security. When a protester with Greek citizenship was injured, Albania’s Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs issued a response saying those responsible for the violence had been arrested and would face prosecution.

A project sold as an investment began to look, on the ground, like a struggle over force, access and who gets removed from the frame when development arrives. Residents were left facing fences, guards and criminal proceedings while the companies behind the project continued to speak in the language of growth and jobs.

A protected lagoon under pressure

Zvërnec lies in or near the Narta Lagoon, part of the Vjosa–Narta Protected Landscape and a wetland recognised as internationally important for migratory waterbirds. Conservation groups have warned that the area is significant for dozens of species listed under international agreements and that further large-scale infrastructure or tourism development would damage habitats already under pressure.

The pressure did not begin with the current project. Earlier reporting on the so-called “Zvërnec Trust” described plans for construction of up to eight floors within the protected area. The current fight belongs to that longer history of protected land repeatedly reopening to investor ambition.

Sazan: military base to luxury resort

Sazan carries a different history but the same tension. For decades, it was a military island, restricted, strategic and largely inaccessible before reappearing as a luxury resort proposition. Moving it from restricted state territory into private tourism changes not only the use of the land but the meaning of the island itself.

On Sazan, the state is inside the project, holding shares and signing as a partner. Albanian records show that the government created a joint‑stock company, Albanian State Development & Real Estate, to represent the state in the “Tourist Resort, Sazan Island” project, and that the company is wholly owned by the Albanian Investment Corporation. AIC is led by Elira Kokona, a former senior government legal official who now heads the corporation and sits at the centre of the state’s real‑estate strategy. Elira Kokona, a long‑time ally of Edi Rama, sits at the centre of the state’s real‑estate strategy. Separate reporting on the project notes that the public‑private partnership involves these state entities alongside Kushner’s Atlantic Incubation Partners and that the development has been granted strategic‑investor status under a ten‑year set of conditions.

Strategic-investor status comes with faster procedures, privileged access to ministries and a smoother route through the bureaucracy than most citizens or smaller investors could expect. In a case this politically sensitive, speed can work in favour of opacity. A project can reach the point of no return before the public has had a clear view of who is behind it and on what terms the state has entered the deal.

The wider geopolitical picture

Foreign policy also runs through the projects. Albania has deepened ties with Israel in recent years in cyber-security, energy and technology, including a memorandum of understanding on cyber cooperation after cyber-attacks that Tirana and its allies attributed to Iran. Those ties have extended into tourism, aviation and economic branding through direct flights and related promotion.

Kushner’s presence sits inside that wider shift. He was one of the key political architects behind the Abraham Accords and later founded the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, an organisation built to deepen the trade, tourism and investment ties created by the normalisation agreements. Reporting around the institute’s annual work has described trade among Abraham Accords partners surpassing 4 billion dollars, with the broader real value estimated much higher once sectors such as services and energy are counted.

Tourism was one of the tools that turned diplomatic normalisation into a permanent economic interest. Analyses of the accords’ economic effects describe tourism growth, direct flights and cross-border business routes as central to making the new alignments profitable and durable. Public reporting in the Gulf press described around 450,000 Israeli tourists visiting the United Arab Emirates in the first two years after the accords.

Set against the tourism and trade deals that followed the Abraham Accords, Sazan falls into line as another link in that chain rather than an outlier. Policy discussion around the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) and related regional integration plans has emphasised the role of ports, infrastructure, tourism and trade routes in binding markets and states together. A luxury development on a strategic Albanian island backed by Kushner, Qatari partners and the Albanian state fits neatly into that picture, whatever commercial language is used to describe it.

An unfinished question

Both the documents and the clashes on the coast circle back to the same question. The point is not to argue against outside money, but to ask whether strategic stretches of coast are being reorganised through opaque structures that hide who profits and leave local people with little say over what is built around them.

Even after following the filings through Albania and the Netherlands, the identities behind the five Albanian shareholders remain off the public record. Public reporting also makes clear that Albania will hold a share through Albanian State Development & Real Estate in the Sazan resort, while the detailed conditions of the partnership remain difficult for citizens to examine in a consolidated form.

As long as those names and terms stay out of view, the story cannot really be closed. The key questions, amongst which are “who those shareholders are,  how profits are divided, and what the state has promised, are still the hardest for citizens to answer from official documents alone.

Update (3 June 2026): As this article goes to press, thousands of protesters marched in Tirana on 2–3 June under the slogan “Albania is not for sale”, explicitly linking the Zvërnec and Sazan developments, while the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecution Office (SPAK) opened a formal investigation into the 2024 changes to the protected status and land ownership in the Vjosa–Narta area.

Until those questions are answered, the fences and protests at Zvërnec will continue to stand for more than a local dispute. They point instead to a wider suspicion that the coast is being reorganised through a system legible to investors and officials but only partly legible to the public asked to live with the consequences.

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Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2026/06/03/exporting-the-abraham-accords-the-hidden-network-converging-on-albanias-shoreline/