Dua Lipa and Ivanka Trump go head to head in Albania

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump found what they call an untouched private island while swimming off a friend's superyacht near Albania. But it wasn't quite as private as they thought… turns out it’s actually a regular day-trip spot for locals. Despite that, the pair now want to build a luxury resort there along a protected coastal lagoon that's a key nesting site for migrating flamingoes, and Albania's government has fast-tracked approval. Many Albanians aren’t happy and thousands have taken to the streets to protest in what's become known as the Flamingo Revolution, including pop star Dua Lipa. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  And I'm Carrington Clark. From Monday to Thursday on ABC Business Daily, we break down the biggest stories in business, finance and the economy and why they matter.

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  Then on Fridays, I'll go deeper on that's business, the people making decisions, taking risks and shaping where the economy goes next.

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• 0:41Matt Bevan?

  This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uwabikal and Gadigal people. A lot of stories involving Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner start on a yacht and this one is no exception.

• 0:57Speaker 04

  We were on our friend Nat Rothschild's boat, we were on a friend's boat and we stopped for a swim.

• 1:03Matt Bevan?

  So they say boat there, which makes it sound like something that you can load onto a trailer and park outside your house. But Nat Rothschild's boat cannot fit on a trailer. It's called Planet Nine and it's so big that it has two separate libraries and a garage to store other boats and a helicopter in. Anyway, Nat, Ivanka and Jared were out on this boat.

• 1:29Speaker 05

  We got picked up in Montenegro and then we started sailing over to Corfu and we spent a couple of days in Albania. One of the nights there, Prime Minister Rama came to the boat.

• 1:39Matt Bevan?

  You know, you're on a boat and the Prime Minister of Albania pops in, totally normal, relatable story. Anyway, they're sailing up the coast of Albania and they come across this island.

• 1:49Speaker 04

  We swam to the islands, we went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top and we were just captivated and it stayed with us ever since.

• 2:00Matt Bevan?

  Now, the way Ivanka describes this place kind of makes it sound like she discovered an untouched private island.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  It's an unbelievable, beautiful 1400 hectare private island in the middle of the Mediterranean and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that's how we found it.

• 2:15Matt Bevan?

  The reality is what she found was a publicly owned island, which was the site of a former naval base and is now a regular day trip spot for Albanians. It's kind of like saying she went for a swim in San Francisco Harbour and found Alcatraz Island, but this beautiful island clearly had an impact on the pair. Jared Kushner says that he later travelled to Vlorae, the town on the mainland, which is closest to the island.

• 2:45Speaker 05

  Obviously, a country is going to build an airport by the coast in the place that they think is the most beautiful. So we went there, we looked for opportunities and we were able to find some incredible, incredible opportunities.

• 2:56Matt Bevan?

  So here's the opportunity he's talking about. Jared and Ivanka are hoping to build a large luxury resort on both the island and the mainland coastline nearest to it. But they have a bit of a problem. It seems like a lot of Albanians don't like this idea.

• 3:25Matt Bevan?

  Throughout this year's hot Mediterranean summer, thousands of Albanians have been taken to the streets, protesting angrily against the proposed resort development and demanding that the Prime Minister, the one who met Jared on that boat, resign from his office.

• 3:51Matt Bevan?

  Now, luxury resorts aren't uncommon in this part of the Mediterranean. So why is this one causing months of angry protests? Is it just because it's Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner? Or is there something deeper going on here? Spoiler alert, there is something much deeper going on here. I'm Matt Bevan and this is If You're Listening.

• 4:29Matt Bevan?

  This is the Italian version of the game show Jeopardy.

• 4:41Matt Bevan?

  It's hosted by a guy named Mike Bonjono, which sounds like a fake name made up by someone who was pressed to make up a name for an Italian game show host at short notice.

• 4:57Matt Bevan?

  Back in the 1970s, this was one of the most popular shows on Italian TV. But little did Mike Bonjono know, he had a slightly larger audience than his ratings would suggest.

• 5:11Matt Bevan?

  Across 75 kilometres of water on the other side of the Adriatic Sea, the people of Albania were building giant homemade aerials so they could pick up Mike on their TVs. See, for most of the Cold War era, Albanian television was entirely free of any entertainment programming. It was just the most dour, depressing communist propaganda imaginable.

• 5:42Matt Bevan?

  So people reached across the sea with their giant wobbly aerials in search of entertainment.

• 5:47Speaker 06

  What are we going to do for entertainment? We started watching Italian channels.

• 5:52Matt Bevan?

  Albanian expat Ursida Sheshi told podcaster Abbas Wahab that people were so desperate for entertainment that they learned Italian to watch it.

• 6:01Speaker 06

  So even the grandmas, even the old people started learning Italian. Everyone. Everyone started learning Italian just by watching, like nobody was learning Italian through books, okay, just by watching the TV.

• 6:14Matt Bevan?

  Communist Albania during the Cold War was unique in its level of isolation and dreariness. Albania's dictator Enver Hoca viewed any form of popular entertainment as anti-communist and any interaction with the outside world as evil.

• 6:30Speaker 06

  Enver Hoxa presided over a state with no religion, no taxes and no private cars.

• 6:36Matt Bevan?

  Under Hoca, Albania was entirely isolated, a hermit kingdom with absolutely no connection to the outside world. They were even more isolated than like North Korea today.

• 6:53Matt Bevan?

  They had no visitors and regular Albanian citizens were not permitted to leave the country.

• 6:58Speaker 06

  For nearly half a century, time seems to have stood still in Albania. It's the poorest country in Europe and has so far managed to repress large scale popular opposition.

• 7:14Matt Bevan?

  Hoca died in 1985 after 41 years in power and was given a dour, depressing state funeral.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  As the sun rises over Albania's capital city Tirana, nothing immediately suggests that this isolated nation is preparing to escape from the time capsule in which its leaders chose to place it.

• 7:39Matt Bevan?

  His successor had a slightly different vibe and wanted to turn things around for Albania. So he began opening up the country. Europe's last Marxist state, Albania, has unveiled a package of human rights reforms. By the end of 1990, communism was overthrown and Albania was suddenly a capitalist democracy.

• 7:59Speaker 05

  In fact, the last bastion of Stalinism has gone, just like the last statue of the former Soviet dictator.

• 8:07Matt Bevan?

  The thing is though, Albanians had been far more isolated than any of the other new capitalist democracies of the 1990s. They were unique in that they had virtually no understanding of the way that capitalism actually works. The country had no market economics or private investment at all. As a result, no population in modern history has been more vulnerable to the arrival of a wallet inspector than early 1990s Albanians. So let me introduce you to the wallet inspector.

• 8:46Matt Bevan?

  In 1996, Albanians still mostly watched Italian TV. Their new democratic government hadn't quite sorted out their own high quality TV yet.

• 9:01Matt Bevan?

  So they watched Formula One with Italian commentary and during the broadcast, they would have seen advertising for the company called Vifa on the edge of the track. But here's the thing, Vifa was not an Italian company, it was an Albanian company.

• 9:22Matt Bevan?

  More specifically, it was a financial company which promised a high rate of return on investments made by Albanian people. Well, actually, high rate of return might be underselling it a bit. If you invested your money into Vifa, they promised those savings would grow by eight percent every month. This was in a year where the S and P 500 global benchmark was going up by about 1.9 percent per month, but Vifa was promising eight percent. This meant if you could raise, say, $100,000 to put into the Vifa scheme in January, by the following January, you would have $250,000 in your account. But Vifa wasn't alone with these wild deals.

• 10:08Matt Bevan?

  Vifa's competitors were offering even better rates, up to 47% per month. At that rate, your $100,000 investment would become $10 million in a year.

• 10:24Matt Bevan?

  Now, if you've grown up with a healthy scepticism of get rich quick schemes, you're unlikely to be fooled by this kind of insane promise. But in Albania, where they didn't really have a whole lot of scepticism about these sorts of things, it seemed like the promise of capitalism had come true.

• 10:43Matt Bevan?

  One in three Albanians are said to have

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Invested their life savings in the get rich quick schemes.

• 10:50Matt Bevan?

  It was actually more than half. According to some reports, it was two thirds of the entire adult population. Albanians dumped their life savings into these schemes. They mortgaged their homes, they sold their possessions, all to raise as much capital as possible to put into their investment accounts.

• 11:16Matt Bevan?

  Now, it probably won't surprise you to hear that these schemes did not actually deliver on those returns. They were nothing more than Ponzi schemes, where early investors' returns were provided by a direct transfer of money from those who entered into the scheme later. In just a few years, the frenzy of investment into these schemes had put Albania's fledgling economy in an extremely dangerous position. By mid 1996, international financial agencies were starting to panic, sending delegations to Albania to personally warn President Sally Barisha that he was on the verge of a catastrophe. By then, more than half of Albania's GDP had been invested in the schemes.

• 12:01Matt Bevan?

  At the end of that year, the schemes started to collapse.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Albania was the most closed, most backward of Europe's communist countries. And now it's finding that the path to capitalism is not always paved with gold.

• 12:17Matt Bevan?

  One after another, the schemes announced that actually, they couldn't keep paying out their promised returns because all the money was gone.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  The whole country has been shaken by the collapse of a number of pyramid savings schemes. The government is being blamed for not protecting its people, even of profiting from the schemes.

• 12:37Matt Bevan?

  The country looked on the verge of collapse. An exodus began with thousands of Albanians boarding boats to try and get to Italy. People were becoming desperate.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  This woman had sold everything she had and sank the proceeds into one of Albania's pyramid investment schemes. When the scheme collapsed, she'd lost the lot. Now her child would be going to an orphanage.

• 13:03Matt Bevan?

  Those who stayed were angry, and a protest movement began, focused on one particular town on Albania's coast.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  In the troubled port town of Vlora, these protests have become a daily event. Last week it exploded in anger, and four people died amid chaotic scenes.

• 13:24Matt Bevan?

  Vlora, as in the town that Jared Kushner has been flying in and out of while he looked for resort opportunities.

• 13:30Speaker 05

  And we were immediately drawn to where they were building an airport in Vlora. And obviously, a country is going to build an airport by the coast in the place that they think is the most beautiful.

• 13:38Matt Bevan?

  Yes, that Vlora. But back in the 90s, Vlora was a very different place.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Vlora is the seat of the anti-government rebellion.

• 13:49Matt Bevan?

  Within a few weeks of the collapse of the schemes in early 1997, the town was under mob rule.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  Angry protesters have taken control of several Albanian towns. I have been working for seven years, and I lose everything.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  I lose everything. So now, the point is that we don't want any political solution, I want my money.

• 14:13Matt Bevan?

  The people of Vlora weren't satisfied. They wanted President Barisha to resign too. They decided to make that clear by paying a visit to his villa just outside Vlora.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Looters have descended on his summer palace, stripping it of anything they can carry away.

• 14:30Matt Bevan?

  Albania appears to be on the verge of civil war tonight, with a growing anti-government insurrection in the south. The focus is the Adriatic port of Vlora. Protesters, or I guess rebels by this stage, began preparations to fight the government by looting army weapons depots and gathering hundreds of thousands of firearms. Just down the road, we met two young men who willingly displayed the spoils they took from the local army stores a few days ago. A trusty Kalashnikov and a couple of grenades. As the rebels clashed with the authorities, President Barisha began making concessions to his opponents, hoping that it would calm everything down. Then Albania's neighbours got involved.

• 15:12Matt Bevan?

  Italy was appointed to lead a UN peacekeeping delegation to Albania.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  We have a moral, moral duty. They are neighbour, they are in the Mediterranean area, they are a problem for us.

• 15:25Matt Bevan?

  Fortunately, a full-blown civil war was averted. But the Albanian people remained largely destitute. Making matters worse, the enormous quantity of guns that had been looted from the army were still at large.

• 15:39Speaker 06

  Looted weapons are being used in robberies, traditional blood feuds, and to settle arguments.

• 15:45Matt Bevan?

  They say they'll give them up when they're sure there's someone in charge they trust. I'll decide when I give these weapons back, he says. I won't do it just because some politician tells me to. Just seven years after Albanians won their freedom from communist dictatorial rule, unregulated capitalism had virtually destroyed the country. Albania developed a reputation for chaos, people and weapons smuggling, and as a hub of international organised crime, run by a mafia operating in the shadows.

• 16:19Matt Bevan?

  The country's future was extremely unclear. What was clear to most Albanians, though, was that get rich quick schemes could not be trusted. But there was some hope for them yet. A lot of Albanians scrambled to survive. But their country is on a hopeful path of integration with the European Union. The land of eagles is a candidate to become a member. The group of countries which joined the EU in 2004 had all seen boosts to their economies. And Albania wanted a piece of that. But applying to become a member of the European Union isn't an easy process. You have to do a lot of work on yourself before they'll let you in.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  The biggest part of the project was to support these countries in their efforts to meet European standards and European rules.

• 17:07Matt Bevan?

  When Albania applied to become a member of the EU in 2009, the average length of time it took from application to membership was about eight years. But after four years, they had made no progress at all. In fact, talks had stalled entirely. This was mostly not Albania's fault. The global financial crisis had made the EU suddenly hyper cautious about admitting new countries to the union. But still, Albanians were frustrated by the government's inability to make progress. So they started looking for a man of action to take over. His name is Eddie Rama, and he's on a mission. Eddie Rama has been at the forefront of Albanian politics ever since he became mayor of the capital Tirana in 2000.

• 17:53Matt Bevan?

  By any measure, Eddie is no ordinary mayor. A rap-singing former basketballer who once lived the life of a painter in Paris.

• 18:07Matt Bevan?

  He talked about the first time he walked into Tirana City Hall as being like walking into a bureaucratic nightmare. When I entered here, I felt like entering a Kafka book, you know, it was like, like amazing. I, I entered here and I said, my God, what I do here? He said the haze of cigarette smoke through the halls made the place feel like it was filled with a fog that slowed everything down. He banned smoking in city hall, which was kind of a surprise because most of what he says kind of sounds like it's coming from a 70s bohemian with a cigarette lazily hanging from between his fingers. I don't feel that art is an angelic work.

• 18:52Matt Bevan?

  And I don't feel, feel that politics is a devil work, by definition. Devil is everywhere, and angel is everywhere. Okay, Michelangelo, if you say so. Rama's most famous policy was painting the drab Cold War era buildings of Tirana in bright colours. Did he fix Tirana? No, not entirely. But when the country was looking for a man of action as the process of joining the EU dragged on, this is the guy they picked to replace the longtime leader Sally Barisha.

• 19:26Speaker 06

  Albania's opposition leader Eddie Rama has claimed a landslide election victory. Rama is calling on Prime Minister Sally Barisha to concede defeat.

• 19:36Matt Bevan?

  A big part of Rama's strategy as prime minister was to promote tourism. Tourist visitors to Albania have quadrupled since he took office, up from about 3 million per year in 2013 to more than 12 million now. But while he's pushed hard to expedite the process of joining the EU, they still aren't a member of the club. Albania remains one of the poorest countries in the region. Which is why Eddie Rama was very interested when Jared Kushner arrived on a boat with multiple libraries, offering a very, very big stack of money.

• 20:11Speaker 05

  We spent a couple of days in Albania. One of the nights there, Prime Minister Rama came to the boat.

• 20:17Matt Bevan?

  Apparently Jared Kushner in particular was quite taken by Rama's charms.

• 20:21Speaker 05

  One of the cool things I was attracted to is the fact that he seemed like a very skilled politician, is a very strong and smart leader, but also the fact that he was an artist. I thought it'd be very cool to see what a country really led and built by an artist could be.

• 20:36Matt Bevan?

  And it turns out that Rama was pretty taken with Kushner too. Or at least, he was pretty taken with the eye-watering amount of money on offer. Which is why Rama's government rushed through approval for Ivanka and Jared's proposed developments. He declared that Albania needs luxury tourism, like a desert needs water. By cutting red tape and designating Kushner's development company as a strategic investor, Rama has cleared the way for a reported $4.7 billion, four and a half square kilometre resort.

• 21:13Matt Bevan?

  It includes more than 1,000 villas and townhouses, 1,400 apartments, a casino, a golf course, a water park, and a marina designed for mooring super yachts, sorry, boats. The development is the size of an international airport, and it's being planned for a site that currently is an untouched nature reserve. Rama says the tourists who visit this massive five-star resort will inject enormous amounts of money into the Albanian economy. The trouble is that a lot of Albanians really don't support the regulatory shortcuts that have made this possible, including one very famous Albanian.

• 21:57Matt Bevan?

  We can't talk about the history of Albania without talking a lot.

• 22:00Speaker 06

  A little bit about Albania today, and I'm sure that a lot of people listening will have heard about all the protests that are happening right now.

• 22:07Matt Bevan?

  This is the international pop star Dua Lipa, who is an Albanian citizen, talking on her podcast about the protests against Jared and Ivanka's proposed luxury resort.

• 22:17Speaker 06

  I find it so inspiring to see how much people really care. You know, day after day, they're like hitting the streets because the government has opened up this part of a beautiful nature reserve to a high-end beachfront development.

• 22:31Matt Bevan?

  The beautiful nature reserve is the lagoon next to the city of Lorraine and the island, a few kilometres off the coast. Environmental groups consider this lagoon to be an incredibly important habitat for endangered animals like the loggerhead turtle and the monk seal. It's also a key nesting spot for flamingos while they're migrating between Europe and Africa. The protest movement against the development has become known as the Flamingo Revolution. For Dua Lipa, the concern is that the government is not acting in the best interests of the Albanian people or the flamingos.

• 23:09Speaker 06

  What I actually find concerning is the principle that the government could just change the law to remove the environmental protection without any kind of public consultation.

• 23:19Matt Bevan?

  Now, Ivanka Trump disagrees. She believes that if they clear five kilometres of protected natural habitat in a tasteful architectural way, then it's actually fine.

• 23:29Speaker 04

  We developed the opportunity to help realise its potential and transform it, but with a lot of restraint and care because the land is so beautiful that really the architecture has to be fully integrated into it, almost rise from it.

• 23:45Matt Bevan?

  I guess the flamingos could just book some villas to stay at during their migration. For the protesters, though, it's not really about the turtles or the seals or the flamingos. It's about the government prioritising what they see as another shiny get-rich-quick scheme over the wellbeing of the country.

• 24:02Speaker 07

  This prime minister should leave, and it's not about any more flamingos. It's about healthcare, it's about education, it's about people getting poorer and poorer every day. It's about people leaving their country because they don't want to live here.

• 24:19Matt Bevan?

  The reason they think that the entire system is corrupt is because support for Jared and Ivanka's project is actually bipartisan. Prime Minister Rama supports it, obviously, but so does the opposition leader Sally Barisha, the guy who was in charge of the country during the pyramid scheme era through the 1990s. So here's where we've ended up. Both the opposition leader and the prime minister, two veterans of Albanian politics who've been at war with each other for years, who otherwise agree on almost nothing, agree on this. The thousands of protesters who are taking to the streets night after night don't really have a voice apart from their own, and yet they can see a pattern emerging.

• 25:03Matt Bevan?

  Thirty years ago, they were sold the idea that they could live like the fabulous Italians on their TV screens if they just handed over all their savings. Their government facilitated it, despite warnings from foreign financial organisations that they were doing something crazy. This time, the idea they're being sold is that a relationship with the Trump family is a quick route to prosperity. All they have to do is hand over their land and a bit of their sovereignty. Once again, the government is not doing anything to stop it, despite warnings from foreign bureaucrats. The difference is, this time, the Albanian people aren't naive. They have real concerns that they're being sold another get-rich-quick scheme, and this time, they are not buying it.

• 25:54Matt Bevan?

  If You're Listening is written by me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon. It's produced by Adair Shepherd. Next week, we're going to take a little break from detailing the financial exploits of Donald Trump and his family and take a trip to the UK. A lot has changed in the last little while. The country has a brand-new prime minister, for one, and there's a very important by-election coming up, where one of the contenders is a count with a bin for a head. That's next week on If You're Listening.