What Is Jared Kushner Actually Building on Sazan Island?
A $1.4 billion resort on a former Soviet submarine base, brokered aboard a Rothschild yacht, financed by Gulf sovereign wealth — surrounded by Epstein's social network.
On the second night of June 2026, several thousand Albanians took to the streets of Tirana, blocking traffic and chanting "Albania is not for sale." Their immediate target was Prime Minister Edi Rama. Their actual target was a $1.4 billion resort development on Sazan Island, a 1,400-hectare strip of land at the mouth of Vlorë Bay that was, until recently, a top-secret military zone studded with 3,600 nuclear bunkers and a half-century-old Soviet submarine base. The American developer behind the project is a firm called Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC, affiliated with Jared Kushner's private equity vehicle Affinity Partners. Albania's Special Prosecution Office Against Corruption and Organized Crime -- known as SPAK -- has opened a formal investigation into the land reclassifications that cleared the way.
Most of the international coverage has focused on the optics: Ivanka Trump describing Sazan as a "private island" the family had "discovered," the Aman Resorts branding, the flamingos and Mediterranean monk seals in the adjacent Vjosa-Narta wetlands, the "Trump Island" jokes on The Daily Show. The optics are bad, but they're also a distraction.
The interesting questions are these: Why, of all the post-government opportunities available to a former White House adviser, did Jared Kushner choose a strategically located former military island honeycombed with Cold War tunnels? Who introduced him to it? Where is the money coming from? And -- given who his introducer is, and who his introducer's social circle is -- should anyone be entirely comfortable taking the "luxury eco-resort" pitch at face value?...
Sazan is unlike any other piece of land currently being marketed to tourists in the Mediterranean. France 24 reported in 2015 that beneath the pine and fig trees lie roughly 3,600 one-man nuclear bunkers and "kilometres of tunnels and underground facilities including a cinema, a school and a hospital."...
For most of the 20th century the island was strictly off-limits to civilians. It opened to limited tourism in 2015. In December 2024, the Albanian government declassified the island for civilian development. Atlantic Incubation Partners -- Kushner's vehicle -- was named a "Strategic Investor," a designation that allows expedited permits, fast-tracked environmental review, and a bundle of incentives unavailable to ordinary applicants....
Here is what Kushner has said, on the record, about how he came to be building this thing.
On the All-In Podcast, hosted by venture capitalists Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, Kushner explained the origin of the deal. "We were on a friend's boat," he told the hosts, "Nat Rothschild's, on vacation." From the deck of that yacht -- Kushner described it as a casual sighting from the water -- he saw the Albanian coastline and began making inquiries about investment opportunities in the country. He later met Edi Rama on the same yacht....
So who is the friend whose boat Kushner was on?
Nathaniel Philip Victor James Rothschild, the 5th Baron Rothschild, is a British-born Canadian financier and hereditary peer. He sits within the Rothschild banking family but operates independently from its principal financial institutions. He is now a naturalized citizen of Montenegro, where he reportedly maintains substantial holdings....
His public record is colorful. In 2008, Rothschild hosted then-EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson and then-Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, separately, aboard the megayacht of Russian aluminum oligarch Oleg Deripaska off Corfu -- a scandal that produced a parliamentary inquiry in London, a public quarrel between Rothschild and Osborne in the press...
The pattern, across two decades of public reporting, is consistent: Rothschild as the man whose yacht the politicians are on, whose plane they are on, whose Adriatic compound they are on. He is the broker, as well as the host....
Nat Rothschild does not appear in Jeffrey Epstein's flight logs. He does not appear in the so-called "black book" by first name. What he does appear in, repeatedly, is the email correspondence of Peter Mandelson -- Rothschild's close friend, one of Kushner's indirect predecessors in the role of "the politician on the Deripaska yacht," and one of Jeffrey Epstein's documented intimates from 2002 through at least 2011.
The Mandelson-Epstein emails, released by the House Oversight Committee in November 2025 and reinforced by the DoJ release in December, are now a matter of public record. They span a decade. They show Mandelson seeking Epstein's advice on his post-government career, gossiping with Epstein about mutual acquaintances, accepting Epstein's hospitality, and -- most relevantly here -- using Epstein as a backchannel to help Nat Rothschild.
In April 2010, Mandelson forwarded Epstein an email he had written to Jes Staley, then a senior executive at JPMorgan (later CEO of Barclays, and himself now a figure of significant Epstein-related embarrassment). The forwarded message read in part: "I've been following my friend Nat Rothschild's plans to list a vehicle on the LSE and I'm very happy that JPM are now planning to get involved as book runners alongside Credit Suisse." Mandelson was, by his own admission to Epstein, using their relationship to help promote Rothschild's London listing -- the Vallar vehicle that would later become Bumi.
Epstein's reply, captured in the released files, was characteristic: "You are soooooooooooooooo devious." Epstein understood exactly what he was reading: Mandelson laundering a favor for Rothschild through an Epstein-adjacent banker....
In May 2010, Epstein wrote, of a planned dinner involving former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak: "nat's sister doesn't know about me, does she?" The exchange suggests, at minimum, that Epstein believed Nat Rothschild's sister might possess information that could embarrass him. That is not the worry of a man who has never been in proximity to the family. It is the worry of a man whose proximity has produced something he would prefer to keep buried....
Affinity Partners -- the firm that will hold whatever Sazan ultimately becomes -- was launched in early 2021 with a $2 billion anchor investment from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. The Saudi screening panel that reviewed the proposal recommended against it, citing Kushner's inexperience, the firm's excessive management fees, and the public-relations risk. Mohammed bin Salman overruled the panel....
There is a document in the DoJ release worth pausing on, because it makes a point about both the substance and the curatorial choices of the file dump itself.
The document bears the Bates number EFTA00010777. Its subject line, in full, reads: Fw: Apollo/Epstein/Kushner connection. The author, identifiable from the surviving body text and from a long trail of related emails throughout the release, is Christopher Dilorio, a financial-industry whistleblower who has been writing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, the IRS, and others since at least 2017 alleging that an Apollo--Epstein--Kushner triangle has operated a money-laundering and stock-fraud network through small-cap public shell companies....
Two things about this document deserve attention.
The first is the shape of the redaction....
The second is the substance.... The triangle Dilorio described in his 2017 emails is the triangle the files now describe in 2026. Whether the SEC's failure to investigate reflects regulatory incompetence, regulatory capture, or something else is a question for another piece.
What is worth noting here is only this: the email exists, the email names the connection, the email is partially blacked out, and the blacked-out portion is the part that would reveal who was being told....
The Albanians, for now, are right to be in the streets. The rest of us are right to be asking what, exactly, is being built -- and on whose behalf, and using which network, and under what terms.
...Kushner now operates, with the explicit backing of the same Gulf sovereigns and through the same brokers and on the same financial scaffolding, the kind of private-jurisdiction infrastructure that Epstein himself spent his last fifteen years assembling on a much smaller budget.
Continue reading at: https://tomselliott.substack.com/p/what-is-jared-kushner-actually-building
