Jared and Ivanka's Albanian job and emergence of private city-states
Key Markets report for Friday, 12 June 2026
Toward the end of May and through June, Albaniagate affair hit the proverbial ventilator for the Trump/Kushner clan. Apparently, President Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner merely purchased an island in the Adriatic sea where they were going to build a luxury resort. What could be less controversial, right?
Well, Jared and Ivanka’s purchase involved not only the Sazan island off the coast of Albania but also some 2.5 square kilometers of the protected Vjosa-Narta coastal landscape on the mainland. Albanian laws specifically protected that zone as it was home to flamingos, Mediterranean monk seals, and sea turtle nesting sites, and the “resort” project required overturning those laws. Amazingly, Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama secretly obliged, and the construction work started in May, with clearing of the pine forests and dunes.
Then, all of a sudden, the ungrateful Albanian locals got the wind of the situation and started to protest. PM Rama went on TV to deny that the Trumps bought the island or that there was even any project taking shape (here he’s speaking in English to CNN). Unfortunately for Rama, the tone-deaf Princess Ivanka completely contradicted him when she decided to speak out publicly about the affair. On May 31 she went on David Senra’s Founders podcast where she waxed eloquent about the way she and her husband discovered Sazan island and how they came to own a prime chunk of Albania’s sovereign territory. It was all about the personal quest for authentic living
Winning friends and influencing people
Jared Kushner also ventured to speak about the project and made further revelations: the friend off whose boat they swam to Sazan island in 2021 was none other than Nathan Rothschild, who was able to summon Albania’s Prime Minister Rama to his boat for an evening with the Kushners, suggesting that there may have been more to the affair then just Ivanka’s quest for authentic living.
Sazan is not a resort island. Through history, it has been a critical strategic military chokepoint, facilitating the control of the Strait of Otranto, and the access to the entire Adriatic. Every empire that wanted to control the Adriatic, wanted Sazan, including the Greeks, Romans, Venetians, Ottomans, Germans and the Soviets. Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev said in 1958 that from that location, he could control the Mediterranean sea , all the way to Gibraltar.
What Ivanka described as “An unbelievable, beautiful 1,400-hectare private island in the middle of the Mediterranean,” has over 3,500 nuclear bunkers and kilometers of tunnels and hardened underground facilities, including a submarine dock. It is important enough that it is still a military zone for Albania. It is little wonder then, that the deal to take over the island was negotiated in secret. The Albanian government approved it immediately after Trump won re-election in November 2024. But the Albanian citizens and their own parliament only found out when the press reported it.
Back to private city-states?
Secret attempts to take control of a strategically important territories seem to be cropping up more and more frequently. Over the recent months, numerous reports emerged about Israeli nationals seeking to purchase real estate or islands in many different locations around the world. And while many of these transactions may be ordinary purchases for an alternative or secondary home, some of them resemble quest for territorial carve-out with the view of supplanting the host nation’s sovereignty.
Examples include Greece, Portugal, Italy, United States and Cyprus, which might be the most controversial example (both on Greek and Turkish sides of the island) with thousands of properties acquired, population growth of Israelis there, and heated local debates over their “gated communities” and “strategic buys.” Likewise, numerous reports emerged from Ukraine where exclusive zones have appeared, protected by special police units barring access to local Ukrainians.
And it’s not only the Israeli interests behind this new quest for private sovereign territories. In a model that’s strangely similar to Kushner’s Sazan island, Honduras granted a substantial chunk of its national territory to Peter Thiel to establish a privately governed chartered city Prospera ZEDE (Zona de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico), a special economic zone located primarily on the island of Roatán (with additional areas on the mainland coast near La Ceiba). Prospera ZEDE operates as a semi-autonomous “startup city” or “governance platform” with its own legal, tax, regulatory, and administrative systems—independent from much of Honduras’ national framework. Effectively, it’s a state within a state backed by foreign investors.
In fact, Thiel’s move to Argentina, which he recently announced, appears to have to do a lot more with the project of developing new, privately owned sovereign entities across South American than it does with a desired lifestyle change. Thiel has spoken extensively about reengineering nations to make them privately owned entities, owned by shareholders and managed like private corporations, but the idea that certain people and interests actually seem to be going through with that seems utterly bizarre.
Significantly, it is yet another indicator that we are in the process of a disruptive transition of society from structures we were accustomed to, toward new and different realities that we’re yet to confront, and many of which are being organized secretly, in “smoke filled rooms” or on superyachts.
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Today’s trading signals
With yesterday’s closing prices we have the following changes for the Key Markets portfolio:
