by Tom Elliott, Tom Elliott:
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.
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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?
The answers, as far as they go, are documented. Kushner told the All-In Podcast that he discovered the island while on vacation aboard the yacht of his friend Nathaniel Rothschild, and that he later met privately with Edi Rama aboard the same yacht to begin discussions. Affinity Partners’ principal known investor is the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which wired Kushner $2 billion in 2021 over the objections of its own screening committee. And Nat Rothschild’s documented social network — the people he has worked with, sued, sailed with, and been photographed with for the last two decades — overlaps in non-trivial ways with the social network that ran Jeffrey Epstein’s last decade.
This is not a piece arguing that Kushner is building Epstein’s island. It is a piece arguing that the network around Kushner is harder to dismiss than the press has so far been willing to dismiss it.
The Bunker Island
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.” Smithsonian magazine, covering the island’s first opening to tourism that same year, described an intact network of bunkers and tunnels used by Cold War soldiers. The Soviet Union maintained a Whiskey-class submarine base there in the late 1950s, and Western open-source reporting has long alleged a chemical weapons facility, though no party has officially confirmed it.
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. The development scope, as reported by Albanian and international press, is enormous: as many as ten thousand hotel rooms and villas spread across the island and adjacent coastal areas, restoration and “adaptive reuse” of the Cold War-era military structures, a marina, an Aman Resorts-managed flagship hotel, and a perimeter that will include parts of the Vjosa-Narta lagoon, an ecologically protected wetland that serves as a stopover for migrating flamingos and a habitat for monk seals and sea turtles.
Calling this an “eco-resort” requires a generous definition of both terms. Calling it a “private island” — as Ivanka Trump did in the comments that finally sparked the public backlash — requires a generous definition of private. Sazan remains, in a strict legal sense, Albanian sovereign territory. What is being negotiated is not ownership but a long-term concession with extraordinary privileges, on land that was previously classified as both protected and strategic.
SPAK’s investigation, opened in late May 2026, is examining how the protected status was changed and whether the regulatory changes were lawful. Rama has defended the project as central to Albania’s tourism ambitions and has described the project as backed by Qatari capital. Government officials have rejected allegations of favoritism. The protests, by the second day, had drawn several thousand demonstrators per night in Tirana, with smaller actions in Vlorë. Footage of a protester being dragged from the resort site by private security has circulated widely. The Albanian press has begun to ask, openly, whether the island is being prepared as a “billionaire bolt-hole.”
That phrase has been used. Including by major outlets. None of them have asked the question the bunkers force one to ask, which is: a bolt-hole from what?
The Yacht
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. According to Albanian coverage of the interview, Kushner spent roughly a year afterward “studying the market” with a “partner on the ground” before formalizing the project. Those onboard meetings, by Kushner’s own telling, helped seed the conversations that became the Sazan development.
That is the chain of custody the project has, in the man’s own words: yacht, Rothschild, Rama, billion-dollar concession.
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. He has spent his career, by his own description and by the accounts of those who have worked with him, as a connector between Western capital markets and resource-rich, governance-poor jurisdictions.
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