In June 2026, flamingos appeared on the streets of Tirana. Tens of thousands of Albanians flooded the streets, waving inflatable flamingos, demanding their Prime Minister resign. The trigger was a Trump-Kushner resort cleared for construction on a protected wetland.
But the new court documents⁽⁺⁾ — obtained and presented here as the Edi Rama Files — reveal that the Zvërnec resort is merely a single node in an illicit real estate network that spans from Albania's coastline to its capital, authorised by Prime Minister Edi Rama himself.
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Edi Rama: The Man With the Stamp
The Edi Rama Files focus on the activities of Albania’s National Territorial Council, the Keshilli Kombetar i Territorit (KKT). It issues permits for every major development in the country. Its chairman is Prime Minister Edi Rama.
Since his arrival to power in 2013, every coastal resort and city skyscraper has required Edi Rama's personal signature. Without his stamp, nothing gets built⁽⁺⁾.
That stamp now sits at the center of the scandal that has erupted across Albania. The country’s special prosecutorial service, SPAK, has revealed a sprawling network of drug trafficking and money laundering through the country’s real estate sector.
And every real estate project that is now under investigation by the country’s special prosecutorial service, SPAK⁽⁺⁾, required a stamp of approval from the Prime Minister himself.
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‘Strategic Investors’: Dispossession By Designation
But the permits are only half the story. The other half is the Strategic Investor designation — a legal status Rama's government invented⁽⁺⁾, proposed to parliament, and has deployed on every project that matters.
Once a development receives Strategic Investor status, prior landowners cannot challenge it in court. The state is then legally empowered to compulsorily purchase their competing claims on the developer's behalf.
The Edi Rama Files show that the Green Coast development project, for example, received Strategic Investor status in 2015, one year after Rama signed its development permit. Local landowners who had court-confirmed property rights over the same coastal land — and who had written to the Prime Minister personally — found they had no legal avenue left. Their land became a resort.
Zvërnec South Adriatic Development, meanwhile, received Strategic Investor status in December 2024 — four months after the company was founded, one month before Rama's KKT issued its first development permit.
The land, as SPAK has since established, was obtained via a forged Ottoman document. That forgery secured the previous owner’s claim and Strategic Investor designation gave the new developer legal protection. And Prime Minister Edi Rama’s KKT permit gave them the right to build.
SPAK's court order of 10 June 2026 — 180 pages, over 100 million euros frozen⁽⁺⁾, 20 arrest warrants — is one of the first times that anyone has been held to account for the dispossession wrought through this process. It covers deals Rama personally signed off on. The investigation is ongoing.
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Zvërnec: The Story Breaks Open
In January 2025, Rama's KKT issued development permits for a luxury resort on the Vjosa-Narta lagoon, a protected Adriatic wetland home to flamingos, monk seals, and sea turtles.
The developer was Zvërnec South Adriatic Development — an offshore shell company founded just months earlier — with undisclosed owners linked to Qatari investors and to a project backed by Jared Kushner.
The land had been made available through a sequence of decisions by the Edi Rama government that follow a familiar pattern.
In 2021, Rama's Council of Ministers quietly downgraded the wetland's protected status, stripping more than 5,000 hectares from its boundaries.
In 2024, parliament passed Law 21/2024⁽⁺⁾, amendments to the protected areas legislation that directly opened the door to construction inside what had been the protected zone at Zvërnec.
At the end of that year, the developer received Strategic Investor status. Then the KKT signed the permits.
On 30 April 2026, excavators entered the protected zone before the permits had even been formally countersigned. When local officials arrived to issue a stop-work order, the company told them to contact Tirana.
Albania's Special Anti-Corruption Prosecution (SPAK) opened a criminal investigation⁽⁺⁾ into the land acquisition and the 2024 regulatory changes. Its findings are at the center of the Edi Rama Files.
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SPAK: Crimes Laundered on the Albanian Coast
SPAK's case files trace the Zvërnec land to a man named Artur Shehu, originally from Vlorë, who resides in Florida while running business interests across Albania's coast.
Shehu's ownership claim rested on an Ottoman-era document — the "Daimi Register of 1318" — purportedly proving his ancestor owned the land centuries ago. Albania's Supreme Court found the document had been forged and intentionally mistranslated.
SPAK alleges he is also a cocaine trafficker — with political connections. In January 2019, European law enforcement monitored a meeting in Aruba during which Shehu and his associates discussed cocaine logistics in Latin America and real estate investments in Albania "potentially financed with illicit funds and supported by political authorities."
Following that money, SPAK's investigation expanded beyond Zvërnec. The same network — same names, same method — runs through the Garden Building and Colonnade towers in central Tirana, a plot near the Air Albania Stadium, and the Green Coast resort at Palasa on the Ionian coast.
On 10 June 2026, the court issued Decision No. 432: 20 arrest warrants, over 100 million euros in assets frozen, properties across Tirana and the southern coast seized. Among the frozen assets: villas inside Green Coast, the luxury resort on the Ionian coast in cadastral zone ZK 1739, Gjileke, Palase, Vlorë.
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Green Coast: The Smoking Gun Signature
The Edi Rama Files show that the cadastral zone ZK 1739 — identified by SPAK in its sweeping criminal case — is the same zone as KKT Decision No. 8, dated 7 March 2014: the development permit for Green Coast signed by Edi Rama in his first year in office.
When Rama signed, the land was already under dispute. His own task force had flagged title problems in the area. Local families with court-confirmed property rights wrote to the Prime Minister personally asking him not to authorise the construction.
Rama signed anyway. The following year, his government passed legislation granting Green Coast Strategic Investor status — legally empowering the state to compulsorily purchase the competing claims of dispossessed families on the developer's behalf.
In 2017, a second KKT decision expanded the resort further. And again in 2020, Rama's KKT granted developer status inside Green Coast to Aleksandar Frangaj, owner of TV Klan, Albania's most-watched private television channel — a network the Media Ownership Monitor describes as having "been accused of receiving rewards for its pro-government editorial line."
But the SPAK files reveal something more: the drug trafficking network was not merely buying villas inside Green Coast. It was trying to buy access to the permitting system itself.
Intercepted communications in the SPAK case files show that in February 2021, members of the network discussed paying between 2 and 3 million euros to Samir Mane — owner of the Balfin Group and developer of Green Coast, one of the richest and most powerful oligarchs in Albania — to act as an intermediary in
obtaining a construction permit for a residential complex of around 30 villas and a hotel inside the Green Coast 2 development.
By 24 February 2021, one member of the network messaged another confirming that he had spoken with "Liri" (Ilir Shtufi, also named in the SPAK arrest warrants) and "Zamiri" (Samir Mane), and that Mane had told him he would need three million euros to include the land of network associate Alfredo Hamzai in the complex.
Three days later, the network confirmed they had decided on the three-million-euro payment to Mane for inclusion of the land in Green Coast. The permit, the files note, was to cover approximately 40 villas, with 20% going to the person under investigation.
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‘Fuck You’: Edi Rama Responds
The protests began on 23 May 2026 in Zvërnec village, when residents tried to stop the excavators and private security guards assaulted them while police watched. Within days, the streets of Tirana filled. Within two weeks, tens of thousands were marching. They have not stopped.
Prime Minister Edi Rama’s response has been contemptuous from the start. He dismissed the protests as "engineered digital hysteria". When they grew, he attributed them to foreign cyber activists, then to Iran.
Rama deployed a promotional video featuring Ivanka Trump praising Albania's natural beauty — released while SPAK was actively investigating the land whose permits his government had issued.
Rama also misled the Albanian public about the extent of his real estate dealings. He told parliament that no final decision on the Kushner project had been made, while his KKT had already signed two development permits, his government had already de-protected the wetland, and his construction crews were already inside it.
Rama has even gone so far as to attack the special prosecutor’s office he helped to set up, in a desperate effort to cover for crimes committed under his supervision. He has publicly described SPAK's prosecutors as "going off the rails" — the same institution that has since frozen over 100 million euros in assets connected to projects his own KKT authorised.
The European Parliament has called for a halt to construction in protected areas and the repeal of the laws that made these developments
possible. Albania's EU accession process — which Rama has made the central promise of his tenure — now depends on the rule-of-law reforms his government has spent years undermining. SPAK is still investigating.
Albania is asking the world to finally pay attention to Edi Rama’s governance of their country — beyond the TED talks, European summits, or embrace by US President Barack Obama. These files give hard evidence of their reason.
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Edi Rama is just
one node of
the Reactionary International.
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