By Habjon Hasani
On the afternoon of June 13, 2026, a scion of the Rothschild financial dynasty, Nathaniel, publiclystated his position for the first time regarding the protected area of Butrint in Albania. This public position by Nathaniel Rothschild comes at a time when Albania is engulfed in antigovernment protests over protected areas — a story centered on Albanian Prime Minister Edi
Rama, but one that also involves relatives of President Trump, investment funds from Qatar, landholders in Albania investigated for cocaine trafficking, all accompanied by the paranoia of online influencers.
The record so far is held by Candace Owens in the United States, who is doing everything she can to make this entire narrative be interpreted through an emphasis on the Rothschild surname, perhaps because that surname carries suggestive power and makes one sound more interesting when speaking to an audience that has no idea where Albania is located.
This article will attempt to shed light on the real role of the figures involved in this story, and we will use the method of “inverse reasoning”; like Candace Owens, we too will tell the story while keeping Nathaniel Rothschild and his role as our point of reference. First of all, we must define two entirely different axes through which he is connected to Albania and to its protected areas, and we will analyze each axis separately.
Axis 1 — Nathaniel Rothschild as an acquaintance and friend of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who are involved in the investment in Zvërnec.
Axis 2 — Nathaniel Rothschild as a scion of the family that has been caring for the protected area of Butrint in Albania for three decades.
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Axis 1 — The yacht, Jared, Ivanka, Edi Rama, the project
In July 2021, while Donald Trump was at his lowest political point and under investigation, Nathaniel Rothschild invited Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka to his villa in Corfu, Greece, to spend their holidays together. An unusual Albanian figure, a friend of Nathaniel Rothschild named Auron Tare, also contacted Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama so that he could join this group on the yacht. Unlike Donald Trump, in 2021 Edi Rama was at the height of his power: he had won a third term in Albania, Joe Biden had been elected President in Washington, while Edi Rama was communicating on WhatsApp with U.S. Secretary of State Blinken; both are also friends of George Soros.
The conversation that day on the yacht appears to have had a mostly formal tone, while at that time Jared Kushner seemed encouraged to make investments in the state of Serbia. The person encouraging and pushing Kushner to focus on Serbia was Richard Grenell.
A few months later, at the Davos summit, Edi Rama and Jared Kushner met again. This time, it appears that their common contact, Richard Grenell, had expanded the scope of ambition beyond Serbia and had coordinated discussions between them about possible tourism investments in Albania. At the 2022 Davos meeting, the possibility of a project on Albania’s Sazan Island was mentioned for the first time.
From that moment onward, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama maintained his relationship with Jared Kushner through Richard Grenell, and the latter became the key link between them. Rama was not comfortable having Nathaniel Rothschild and Auron Tare underfoot — especially the latter, who seemed excessively bothersome with his fixations on Albania’s protected areas.
Grenell was far more comfortable and suitable. He does not care at all about archaeology or protected areas; such things seem like nonsense to him. Money and profit are Grenell’s compass, a trait highly pleasing to Albania’s prime minister. Add to this the fact that Grenell maintained relations with and exerted strong influence over certain figures in Albania’s opposition; in this way, he was a kind of guarantor that the business would proceed without political noise.
Rama’s insistence on working with Jared Kushner through Grenell’s channel became obvious when, two years later, Nathaniel Rothschild suggested that Auron Tare become manager of the Sazan tourism project, but this proposal never received any response. Auron Tare’s proposal to manage Sazan Island was not a whim of Nathaniel Rothschild. Earlier, Auron Tare had been involved in two research projects concerning Sazan. The first was conducted by the American RPM Nautical Foundation: a 10-year underwater research project based in Sazan. The second was linked to a French state project in Sazan — France’s Conservatoire du Littoral — aimed at creating a scientific research center for marine studies.
So, contrary to what Mrs. Candace Owens claims in the United States, as if Sazan Island were a forgotten place that no one knew and one fine day Ivanka pointed at it from the yacht, in reality this island had been studied by American and French institutions. Auron Tare, who brought Edi Rama onto Nathaniel Rothschild’s yacht, was precisely the person involved in both of these projects. But Rama did not want Tare underfoot. Tare had fulfilled his mission: he had made the introduction to Kushner on the yacht. From then on, relations with Kushner would be managed by Grenell.
Sometime around 2024, the first doubts began to emerge about the Sazan Island project. It did not seem to make much sense. Feasibility studies showed that the cost-benefit ratio was inverted. Precisely that year, the alternative tourism project in the Bay of Narta, in Zvërnec, was adopted. The main territory of this project area was held by a figure named Artur Shehu. He is officially under indictment for participation in a structured criminal group and is suspected of leading an international cocaine trafficking network from Latin America. The arrest warrants by the Albanian prosecution were issued last week, at the height of the massive protests being held in Tirana over Zvërnec.
International media interest prompted Jared Kushner to explain how he met Prime Minister Edi Rama, and naturally he mentioned Nathaniel Rothschild’s yacht. This moment activated the paranoia of many people who heard this emblematic surname, which was followed by theories about “dark forces,” when in fact the guarantor and key node of the Kushner-Rama relationship has been Richard Grenell.
Edi Rama chose his own channel as early as the 2022 Davos summit; he made sure that Nathaniel Rothschild and his Albanian friend Auron Tare remained out of the game. It is Richard Grenell who is the mastermind of this relationship and perhaps a beneficiary of the tourism project in Zvërnec. A project that, unusually, indirectly links relatives of the U.S. president, through spirals of interest, with international drug traffickers.
Edi Rama and Richard Grenell are exclusively the two people who cooked up the scandal that has now erupted in Albania.
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Axis 2 — Butrint, the Rothschild family, the Washington-Tirana clowns
Prime Minister Edi Rama may perhaps be right when he says today that he began the Zvërnec project with Jared Kushner at a time when it was not known whether Donald Trump would end up in prison or be re-elected president. Likewise, it is easy to observe that Trump’s political opponents are turning their spotlights toward Albania because the U.S. midterm elections are approaching.
Although there is no criminal liability or implication of Jared Kushner with the suspected drug traffickers who hold the land, the indirect connection is good material for political warfare and anti-Trump rhetoric in the United States. But there is one trace, however, that proves conclusively that Edi Rama, through Richard Grenell, used a visit by Ivanka Trump for his own political credit. In Albania, the Special Prosecution Office, SPAK, is strongly supported by U.S. institutions. In January 2026, SPAK was seeking the removal of Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Balluku’s immunity and her arrest, a request that Rama was preparing to block.
In January 2026, at the height of this crisis between Rama and the Special Prosecution Office, Ivanka Trump arrived in Albania. It was like a coded message. It looked as though Rama was saying that SPAK may have some American bureaucrats, but I have President Trump.
It is perhaps impossible to find a similar case in which a relative of a U.S. president was abused so brutally for the personal troubles of the prime minister of another country. Only Edi Rama and Richard Grenell could construct such a comedy — a comedy that not only undermines the seriousness of the American Presidential family, but presents them as clowns of Edi Rama and Richard Grenell whenever these two need a circus. Today, some pro-Trump analysts believe that Edi Rama may have deliberately drawn the Trump family into this trap, but the archaeological area of Butrint in Albania, protected by UNESCO, is an example showing that Rama had previously drawn the Rothschild financial dynasty into similar spirals of scandal.
For three decades, the family of the late Lord Jacob Rothschild has cared for the Butrint area. In the years 2020-2022, Lord Jacob was in poor health and incapacitated, while Edi Rama, through Michael Granoff — a figure similar to Richard Grenell — implicated this family’s reputation in invasive and allegedly corrupt tourism projects.
A previous investigation by Hashtag.al in 2022 exposed this narrative (read it here).
Michael Granoff is the head of AADF, the Albanian-American Development Fund, an entity that carries the banner of American interests. Granoff and AADF, in a speculative manner, allowed large territories to be detached from the Butrint area, paving the way for tourist villages. Granoff made this concession because Prime Minister Edi Rama wanted at all costs to build resorts in this UNESCO-protected area as well.
Compared with the Zvërnec and Jared Kushner scandal, this scandal is even more serious, because if Jared Kushner bears no responsibility when the government grants a property certificate to a person suspected of being a drug trafficker, in the Butrint case an official American institution such as AADF was implicated in the destruction of UNESCO-protected territories. Paradoxically, the liberal and Democratic politicians in Washington who are now pushing for an investigation into Kushner’s private scandal, while Biden was leading the American administration, allowed the same story to happen in Albania — indeed, they supported it through institutional mechanisms such as AADF, and not privately.
Today, Lord Jacob is no longer alive, and formal control of the family has passed to his son Nathaniel. As such, he no longer has the luxury of simply following his own passions; he has a functional duty to look after the broad spectrum of his family’s interests.
This spectrum also includes the protected area of Butrint, where today it appears that important territories have been detached. This has finally caused Nathaniel Rothschild to take seriously what is happening, because just as the Zvërnec resorts are tarnishing the Trump family name, the same could happen tomorrow to the Rothschild family name. / Hashtag.al
