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Albanian prosecutors are investigating whether the land for Jared Kushner’s luxury resort project was sold with fake ownership papers.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: If you’re unaware, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is trying to build a multi-billion-dollar luxury resort on Albania’s southern coast. Kushner and his wife Ivanka said they got the idea after spotting the coastline from a yacht, and Kushner revealed the plans on social media in 2024 with renderings showing a hotel, villas, pools, and docks for yachts. Developers are also eyeing Sazan Island, an uninhabited island that once housed a secret military base, as a future tourist destination. There’s one big problem: the site sits on protected beaches, forest, and wetlands that are home to sea turtles, flamingos, and other protected species. That has pissed off a lot of Albanians, sparking daily protests for over 40 days under the banner of the “Flamingo Revolution,” a movement that’s grown beyond the resort into demands that Prime Minister Edi Rama resign over alleged government corruption.

What’s going on now: Albanian investigators suspect the man who sold the land never legally owned it in the first place. That man is Artur Shehu, a businessman living in Miami. In April, he sold the coastline to Albania Land Development, the company behind Kushner’s project. But according to case files reviewed by Reuters, Albania’s anticorruption agency, known as SPAK, believes Shehu and his associates made their money trafficking cocaine from South America into Europe, then hid that money by buying up Albanian real estate using forged property documents. In other words, prosecutors think the deeds Shehu used to claim the land were fake. SPAK froze about $126 million from the sale before it could reach Shehu and issued a warrant for his arrest.

Shehu denies all of it. His lawyer, Kujtim Cakrani, said, “Nothing that has been alleged regarding Mr. Artur Shehu’s character is true. He is neither a drug trafficker nor a forger of property documents,” arguing Shehu’s family had owned the land for over a century and sold it legally.

Notably, nobody on the resort side is accused of anything. Prosecutors haven’t pointed the finger at Kushner, Sazan Real Estate Development, Albania Land Development, or any of the project’s other investors, and nothing in Reuters’ review of the files suggests any of them had a clue about the suspicions surrounding Shehu at the time of the sale. A Sazan spokesperson said the company believes “the underlying land acquisitions were conducted lawfully”, and a spokeswoman for Kushner declined to comment.

This all comes as the protests keep escalating, with riot police firing tear gas and blasting water cannons at demonstrators outside parliament last week in clashes that left 15 officers hurt and 25 protesters in custody.

Rama’s government, which has strongly backed the resort, dismisses the demonstrations as staged by political opponents and insists the project complies with Albanian and EU law. Rama, for his part, called it a “beautiful” project last month and said it’s moving forward no matter what.