Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has withdrawn his private equity firm from a $500 million luxury hotel project in Serbia hours after four senior government officials were charged with bribery by prosecutors.
The development had been intended to create the first Trump International Hotel in Europe on a site in Belgrade where the remains of the old Yugoslav Ministry of Defense headquarters still stand.
But, on Monday, Serbia’s Public Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime charged Culture Minister Nikola Selakovic and three others with abuse of office and falsifying documents relating to the undertaking. Selakovic denies any wrongdoing.
A spokesperson for Affinity Partners, Kushner’s Miami-based firm, responded by announcing the business’s withdrawal because “meaningful projects should unite rather than divide and out of respect for the people of Serbia and the city of Belgrade.”
The spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that Affinity had no connection to the alleged offences.
The company had taken out a 99-year lease on the site with the Serbian government and Kushner himself has previously shared concept art of the planned hotel on social media.
President Aleksandar Vucic, who has long championed the venture as a starting point for closer economic ties with the Trump administration, bemoaned the news in Trumpian terms, attacking the prosecutors’ actions as a “witch hunt conducted against the investor, and against any kind of change.”
“We will now be left with a destroyed building, and it is only a matter of time before bricks and other parts start falling off it, because no one will ever touch it again,” he said.
The modernist structure to which Vucic referred was erected in 1965 and reportedly designed as a homage to the Sutjeska River canyon, where the Partisans won a decisive battle against the forces of Nazi Germany in 1943.
It was badly damaged in a U.S.-led Nato bombing campaign during the Kosovo War of 1999 but was designated an area of cultural significance under Serbian law in 2005, safeguarding it from demolition.
Serbian officials moved to override those protections on November 14, 2024, less than two weeks after Trump beat Kamala Harris in the presidential election to secure his return to the White House.
Keen to capitalize on an opportunity the incoming president first expressed interest in in 2013, Vucic hosted both Kushner and Trump Organization Executive Vice President Donald Trump Jr. in Belgrade on several occasions.
He also visited Florida in April this year himself in the hope of meeting his American counterpart, only to have to cut the trip short due to ill health.
Protests were held against the project, most notably on March 24 when the 26th anniversary of the bombing campaign was observed.
“Knowing Trump’s transactional approach, it was his bet this would appeal to him,” Dragan Jonic, an opposition party politician, said of Vucic in an interview Monday.
The project appeared to be in serious jeopardy in May when Goran Vasic, former director of the Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, was arrested after admitting to inventing an expert opinion in order to justify the decision to strip the site of its protected status.
But the Serbian Parliament moved last month to dismiss the protections anyway, making controversial use of an extraordinary constitutional provision to clear the way for the hotel and attracting further protests– all, it now seems, to no avail.
Opposing that measure, lawmaker Marinika Tepic reminded Vucic’s government that the building facing demolition stood as “a symbol of resistance, and proof that a nation that has been shattered, and a state that has collapsed, can rise again.”
“Today, you want to turn that symbol into a luxury complex, just to please Donald Trump,” she said. “On the very spot where bombs once fell, you now plan to pour Champagne.”
Affinity Partners has also recently attracted attention for helping Paramount mount its hostile bid to buy Warner Bros Discovery.
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