In a slickly produced podcast interview published this week, Ivanka Trump talked about her latest real-estate project – what she described as an “unbelievable, beautiful 1,400-hectare private island in the middle of the Mediterranean” plus five beautiful miles of Albanian beachfront intended to become resorts and hotels.
But the project backed by the US president’s daughter and son-in-law Jared Kushner includes planned development of a protected natural area along the coast across from the island, which conservation groups say has already damaged the beautiful area Trump was praising.
The luxury venture has sparked large street protests in the capital, Tirana, where demonstrators carried pink cardboard cutouts of the flamingos whose habitat they say is being threatened, and a broader backlash from citizens in Albania, which has one of the lowest rates of GDP per capita in Europe.
The Europe director for environmental charity BirdLife, Ariel Brunner, said he and other conservationists visited the nature site in early May, where they saw excavators digging up the beach and trucks laying gravel. “There was no sign whatsoever, neither by the lagoon where they were cutting the road, nor on the beach where the machinery was working… there were no signs of any kind of license or permits or even just declaration of who they were.”
