By Andi Bushati
Originally published on lapsi.al
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The message delivered right in the headline is paired with a stark black-and-white photograph showing Ivanka Trump’s husband alongside Artur Shehu.
The paper constructs an in-depth profile of Shehu, outlining his links to narcotics trafficking and the years-long surveillance conducted by European intelligence agencies. These agencies recently supplied documents to SPAK (Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Structure) to target an operation suspected of laundering Latin American cocaine money within Albania.
The story is far from innocent. It highlights that the company Albania Land Development, represented by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, routed roughly $125 million to Artur Shehu’s accounts to acquire contested land for the planned Zvërnec resort development.
The first question that comes to mind after reading this investigation is: how is it possible for a representative of the US presidential family to end up tied to such a controversial figure?
A second question logically follows: how could Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama—who micromanages everything down to the smallest detail, deciding which owners get to develop property, which architects they hire, and what shape projects take—be so careless about a "detail" of this magnitude?
And the questions do not stop there. How did it reach this point? If the Prime Minister's objective was to exploit a rare opportunity to exert influence in White House corridors, how did it produce such a severe counter-effect? Could he not have instructed emissaries sent to Kushner to acquire the land first, removing any shadow of suspicion from the former presidential family?
The fact that this did not happen—that an effort to buy influence backfired into a spectacular own goal—raises suspicion. Was Artur Shehu’s name intentionally kept in play to make him a direct partner with Kushner? Was that the goal? Was it lobbied for? Or, as in the case of former FBI agent Charles McGonigal, was Kushner meant to be tainted with questionable funds to make him easier to maneuver?
This key detail brought to light by the WSJ—that the son-in-law of an American president became partners in Albania with a man suspected of involvement in international cocaine trafficking—is enough to ignite conspiracy theories. The target of these theories is inevitably Edi Rama: the man who invited Kushner to invest in Albania, oversaw every detail of the project, and seemed prepared to defend it even at the cost of his own political office.
Some might claim that behind this "unfortunate coincidence"—currently being leveraged by political opponents against the Trump family—lay a desire to corrupt one of its members. Others, leaning into conspiracy, might see the hand of George Soros, alleging he used an Albanian proxy to strike at a rival in Washington.
Yet beyond these extreme theories attempting to explain the bizarre pairing of Kushner with a alleged trafficker, a simpler explanation exists.
There is no doubt that Edi Rama enticed Trump’s son-in-law. There is no question he was willing to do whatever it took to win Kushner over: amending the law on protected areas, granting strategic investor status, bending regulations to permit building on unresolved property titles, and tolerating barbed wire and aggressive security personnel restricting public beach access.
Yet within this vast authority, one thing remained out of his control. The one privilege he did not possess was the ability to pair his target with a clean partner. That was simply beyond the capability of this all-powerful autocrat. He could not offer Kushner a cleaner deal than what he offers local resort developers—whom he has connected with narcotics traffickers—or high-rise builders operating as money laundering operations.
Under Rama’s system, involving figures of this nature is often the default setting. In a environment where generating wealth without getting dirty is nearly impossible, if it hadn't been Artur Shehu, it inevitably would have been someone like him.
Conspiracy theories aside, this remains the most straightforward explanation for how Edi Rama set out to offer money to Jared and Ivanka, only to become their biggest complication. It all traces back to the system he constructed—a system now being exposed in international media outlets.