Every time you hear about some corpo or another getting to "play a role in the development of $nation" it's pretty much always going to be some kind of bullshit that will employ a lot of locals for shit wages to provide a product or service to residents of the Global North.
There are exceptions of course but the vast, vast, vast majority are tourist trapping and wealth extraction.
> Rama, a long-time friend of the Trump and Kushner families
> The protests, which civil society and international media have called the Flamingo Revolution, have grown well past their environmental starting point into a challenge to Rama himself
(because of accusations he's bending regulations for Kushner that exist for other companies).
> On 30 December 2024, a Strategic Investment Committee chaired by Rama granted strategic investor status to Atlantic Incubation Partners, a firm affiliated with Kushner's Affinity Partners ... Reuters, which saw the written decision, reported .... the terms include no tax during the construction phase while the Albanian state underwrites the water, electricity and sewage infrastructure.
Yeah, forgive me if I don't exactly see his opinion as unbiased.
The resort would destroy lots and lots of species and nature:
"Conservationists describe the wider zone, the Pishe Poro-Narta protected landscape, as one of the Mediterranean's last largely intact coastal wetlands, home to flamingos, more than 200 migratory bird species, Mediterranean monk seals and nesting loggerhead sea turtles."
> What is wrong with building a resort in Albania? OP's link is down but it looks like they're building a pretty normal resort in a normal tourist area. This is a very boring story
I'm not sure if you are trolling.
From the article:
> Albanian anti-corruption prosecutors froze the bank accounts of Albania Land Development, the company that bought beachfront plots for a luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner, as national protests against the project entered their seventh consecutive day. The preventive seizure was ordered by SPAK, the Special Prosecution Against Corruption and Organised Crime, as part of a property-fraud investigation into how land titles in a protected coastal wetland were acquired and how the area was stripped of its protected status.
Furthermore.
> In 2024, the Albanian Parliament passed special legislation reclassifying Sazan and the Pishe Poro-Narta area to permit large-scale development, the move that made the strategic investor designation possible; opposition parties and environmental groups argued the changes were written to accommodate Kushner-linked investors. One administrator of Albania Land Development, Redi Struga, has reportedly been subject to searches.
And of course the old beaten down excuse.
> Rama, a long-time friend of the Trump and Kushner families, claimed the anti-corruption and land defence campaign was being pushed by opponents of Donald Trump.
Protected environmental zone != normal tourist area. Crazy to post Fox News though, it is legally entertainment so has no obligation to report the facts.
The only people this is relevant to are Albanians. I don't expect an Albanian to know about data centers being built in Texas. Hell, I don't expect Michiganders to know about them.
> The only people this is relevant to are Albanians.
That's a short-sighted view. Nature destruction is relevant to people everywhere. The locals might not even care much (unlike in this case, fortunately).
What if this construction project would wipe out animal species x, y or z? That's a permanent, irreversible loss for the world as a whole.
What if some species loses its breeding ground, decimating a population elsewhere? Or takes out a stop halfway a migration route?
Destruction of nature always has 2nd order effects. Don't ignore just because you don't live there.
It's not short-sighted. It's a recognition of time being a finite resource. One can't know everything.
Perhaps I should've said "this only matters to Albanians because everyone else has significantly more pressing matters than this in their own countries.
