https://act.progressive.international/the-edi-rama-files/

Lede: Exposing the PM Kingpin of Albania's Shadowy Real Estate Empire.

In June 2026, flamingos suddenly appeared in 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 new court documents - obtained and presented here as the Edi Rama Files -
reveal that the Zvërnec resort is merely a single node in real estate network
that spans from Albania's coastline to its capital, authorised by Prime Minister
Edi Rama himself.

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.

'Strategic Investors': Dispossession By Designation
But the permits are only half the story. The other half is the Strategic
Investor designation deployed on every major project - a legal status that Rama
invented, proposed to parliament, and which he personally controls as Chairman
of the Strategic Investment Committee.

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.

On 30 December 2024, meanwhile, the Strategic Investment Committee - chaired by
Edi Rama and bearing his signature alongside those of the Deputy Prime Minister,
five ministers, and the state attorney - granted Strategic Investor status to
Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC, the Kushner-linked entity behind the Zvërnec
project.

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.

Cont'd