Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald J. Trump, confirmed on Friday that he was closing in on major real estate deals in Albania and Serbia, the latest example of the former president’s family doing business abroad even as Mr. Trump seeks to return to the White House.

Mr. Kushner’s plans in the Balkans appear to have come about in part through relationships built while Mr. Trump was in office. Mr. Kushner, who was a senior White House official, said he had been working on the deals with Richard Grenell, who served briefly as acting director of national intelligence under Mr. Trump and also as ambassador to Germany and special envoy to the Balkans.

One of the proposed projects would be the development of an island off the coast of Albania into a luxury tourist destination.

A second — with a planned luxury hotel and 1,500 residential units and a museum — is in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, at the site of the long-vacant former headquarters of the Yugoslav Army destroyed in 1999 by the NATO bombings, according to a member of Parliament in Serbia and Mr. Kushner’s company.

These first two projects both involve land now controlled by the governments, meaning a deal would have to be finalized with foreign governments.

A third project, also in Albania, would be built on the Zvërnec peninsula, a 1,000-acre coastal area in the south of Albania that is part of the resort community known as Vlorë, where several hotels and hundreds of villas would be built, according to the plan.

Mr. Kushner’s participation would be through his investment firm, Affinity Partners, which has $2 billion in funding from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, among other foreign investors. In a statement, an official with Affinity Partners said it had not been determined whether the Saudi funds might be a part of any project Mr. Kushner is considering in the Balkans.

“We are very excited,” Mr. Kushner said in an interview. “We have not finalized these deals, so they might not happen, but we have been working hard and are pretty close.”

Mr. Kushner set up his investment company after he left his White House job as a senior adviser. He capitalized on relationships he had built in government negotiating in the Middle East, which included a close relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Kushner ended up securing the $2 billion from the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia and hundreds of millions of dollars more from wealth funds in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. He has taken few public steps so far to actually invest large chunks of this money.

Mr. Grenell also made valuable connections while in government, including some that appear to have given the Kushner team an inside track for investments in the Balkans. During his time in the Trump administration, Mr. Grenell worked on resolving disputes between Serbia and Kosovo.

These discussions indirectly involved Albania, as most citizens of Kosovo are ethnic Albanians and Albania plays a role in the regional discussions.

Mr. Grenell has remained close with Mr. Trump since the former president left office, defending him publicly and speaking to him regularly.

Mr. Grenell has said privately that he hopes to be secretary of state in a second Trump administration, according to a person who has discussed the matter with Mr. Grenell and who described the conversations on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Grenell, in an interview, declined to address on the record any interest in potentially taking a post as secretary of state. He said only that he had not decided whether he would join any future Trump administration.

Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, which tracked business deals it considered conflicts of interest during the Trump administration, said these planned deals were unethical and would only raise new questions about the Trump family, particularly if Mr. Trump was re-elected.

“At this point in the election cycle Jared Kushner should freeze any new investment plans,” Mr. Weissman said. “This particular investment plan seems to involve the worst of every corrupt tendency of the Trump administration and Trump family.”

The Trump family’s involvement in foreign business deals became a major focus during Mr. Trump’s term, with critics ultimately suing and alleging that the family was illegally profiting from foreign payments — referred to as emoluments in the Constitution — while Mr. Trump was in office. These cases were dismissed as moot by the Supreme Court when Mr. Trump left office, but they could be reopened if he was back in the White House.

(Source: The Telegraph_