How Albania’s 2015 Strategic Investments Law fast-tracks billion-euro projects like the Kushner resort, hands investors access to state land, and contains a clause allowing private property to be expropriated for private gain — and the referendum trying to repeal it.
The second folder in the machine. How a 2015 law lets the prime minister fast-track billion-dollar projects, hand investors access to state land, and, on paper, expropriate private property in the interest of another private party.
The Strategic Investments Law, LIGJ Nr. 55/2015, came into force on January 1, 2016, with a stated purpose that sounds unobjectionable: to attract major domestic and foreign investment by offering “special favorable, easing or expediting administrative procedures.” In plain terms, it is a fast lane. A project the government designates as strategic is pulled out of the ordinary permitting queue and given priority handling, assisted paperwork, and direct state support.
It applies across a set of sectors, including energy and mining, transport, infrastructure, agriculture, and, crucially here, tourism. To qualify, a project must clear a minimum capital threshold that ranges, depending on the sector, from roughly one million to fifty million euros. Clear it, and the door opens to a category of privileges ordinary investors never see.
Two of those privileges matter most. The first is access to state-owned immovable property — the law lets the state put public land at a strategic investor’s disposal. The second is a package of fiscal facilities, the tax relief and support that make a marginal project profitable and a profitable one lucrative. Around it sits what one analysis bluntly called a regime of favorable treatment and “a lack of competition.”
The decision to grant all this rests with a single body: the Strategic Investment Committee, a collegial organ of the Council of Ministers chaired by the prime minister. It is the committee, with Edi Rama at its head, that decides who is strategic and who is not.
Buried in the law is a provision that, read plainly, is remarkable in a country that aspires to European norms. The Strategic Investments Law empowers the government to expropriate private property for a private project — to take land from one private owner and transfer it, through the strategic-investment framework, for the benefit of another private party. The cost of the expropriation is borne by the strategic investor.
Read that again. This is not the ordinary power of eminent domain, where a state takes land for a public road or a public hospital. This is a mechanism by which the state can compel one citizen to surrender property so that a favored investor can build on it. Legal observers have flagged the clause precisely because it entitles the government to expropriate “in the interest of another private party.”
The honest caveat, and it matters: by the accounting of the U.S. State Department, this specific power has not yet been exercised. It sits on the books, unused, a loaded provision rather than a fired one. But its existence is the point. In a property system already strained by incomplete land registration and decades of contested titles, a law that lets the executive move private land to private investors is a standing invitation, and the people now fenced out at Zvërnec are watching it closely.
The government sells the Strategic Investments Law as a magnet for the world’s capital. The most damning critique of it comes not from protesters but from Albania’s closest Western ally.
In its Investment Climate Statement, the U.S. State Department recorded that so few foreign investors had actually benefited from strategic status that it had “fueled the perception among foreign investors that the law has benefited mostly domestic companies with strong ties to the ruling majority.” That is a careful diplomatic sentence for a blunt idea: a law advertised as an open door for international investment has functioned, in practice, as a channel for politically connected insiders.
Critics in Albania put it less diplomatically. The law, they argue, asks almost nothing of the investor and almost everything of the state. It is light on obligations for the “strategic investor” and heavy on commitments from the public purse, so that when a project underdelivers, the burden lands on Albanian taxpayers rather than on the company that was fast-tracked. The same dynamic that has shadowed Albania’s wider construction boom runs through the strategic-investment regime: public risk, private reward.
There is an irony worth recording. While extending this insider-friendly fast lane, Albania has separately begun introducing an EU-style foreign-investment screening mechanism, the kind of guardrail designed to scrutinize exactly the sort of opaque, strategically sensitive deals the 2015 law waves through. The country is, in effect, building a brake and pressing the accelerator at the same time.
The Strategic Investments Law is not an abstraction. It is the instrument that delivered the Kushner project.
On December 30, 2024, the Strategic Investment Committee, chaired by Rama, accepted the proposal of Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC, an affiliate of Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, and granted it strategic-investor status under a “special procedure.” That single decision converted a roughly $1.4–1.6 billion plan for hotels, villas and a marina across Sazan island and the Narta lagoon from an idea into a fast-tracked national priority.
The designation is what critics mean when they say the deal “bypassed” the normal safeguards. There was no completed environmental impact assessment. There was no transparent public review of the damage to the lagoon’s protected habitats. The strategic-investor label did what it was built to do: it lifted a billion-dollar project over the ordinary process and set it down inside a protected landscape that a separate law had just been amended to open. One law made the coast buildable; this one made the builder strategic.
Because the Strategic Investments Law was not changed by a single decree that a court could review, the fight to repeal it has taken a different and more populist road than the battle over the protected-areas law.
The vehicle is a referendum. The civic movement “Shqipëria Bëhet” (Albania Becomes), founded in 2023 by the lawyer and activist Adriatik Lapaj, has filed a request with the Central Election Commission to begin collecting signatures, with the stated aim of putting both the Strategic Investments Law and the Mountains Package to a national vote. The threshold is 50,000 signatures per law. Lapaj’s framing is unsparing: with these two laws, he says, “theft is being justified,” and it is “time to stop the theft of the Homeland by law.”
The obstacle is the same one that shadows every repeal route in Albania. The governing majority has repeatedly extended the law’s application window rather than narrowing it — most recently into the second half of the decade, on Socialist votes alone — and the country’s referendum machinery has been effectively unusable for years, a structural blockage that may require constitutional change before any vote can happen. The signatures may come. Whether they can ever reach a ballot is a separate and harder question.
The Strategic Investments Law is the part of the machine that is easiest to defend in the abstract and hardest to defend in practice. Every country competes for capital, and fast-tracking serious investment is not, by itself, a scandal. The scandal is in the details: a committee chaired by the prime minister deciding who is strategic; a standing power to expropriate private land for private projects; a track record, by Washington’s own assessment, of benefiting insiders rather than the foreign investors it was sold to attract; and a marquee deal waved through with no environmental review.
On its own, each provision can be explained. Together with the law that opened the protected coast and the package that sells mountain land for a euro, it stops looking like investment policy and starts looking like a system. That is why the people in the street are no longer asking only about a resort. They are asking who the state works for.
It is Law no. 55/2015, in force since January 2016, which lets the Albanian government fast-track large investments by designating them “strategic.” Strategic status brings priority permitting, state assistance, access to state-owned land, and fiscal benefits. The status is granted by the Strategic Investment Committee, a body of the Council of Ministers chaired by the prime minister.
On paper, yes. The law empowers the government to expropriate private property for the development of a private strategic project, with the cost borne by the investor — effectively allowing land to be taken from one private owner in the interest of another. According to the U.S. State Department, this specific power had not yet been exercised, but its presence in the law is a central criticism.
On December 30, 2024, the Strategic Investment Committee chaired by Edi Rama granted strategic-investor status to Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC, an affiliate of Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, for the roughly $1.4–1.6 billion Sazan and Vjosa-Narta development. The status fast-tracked the project and is part of why critics say it bypassed normal environmental and public-consultation safeguards.
According to the U.S. State Department’s Investment Climate Statement, so few foreign investors had benefited that it fueled a perception that the law mostly helped domestic companies with strong ties to the governing majority. Critics in Albania argue the law places few obligations on investors and heavy burdens on the state and taxpayers.
Yes. The civic movement “Shqipëria Bëhet” (Albania Becomes), led by Adriatik Lapaj, has requested forms from the Central Election Commission to collect 50,000 signatures toward a national referendum to repeal both the Strategic Investments Law and the Mountains Package. Albania’s referendum process faces significant legal obstacles, however.