(Adnkronos) – The project to build a Trump Tower in Belgrade, transforming the ruins of the former Yugoslav General Staff headquarters, which has been dilapidated since it was bombed by NATO in 1999, has been halted. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic confirmed today that plans for the construction of the luxury hotel have been abandoned after the withdrawal of Jared Kushner’s company, Affinity Partner, which owned the venture together with the Trump Organization.
Trump’s son-in-law’s withdrawal came just hours after Serbian prosecutors yesterday indicted four high-ranking government officials, including Culture Minister Nikola Selakovic, for “alleged illegalities” in the approval process of the hotel project, a half-billion-dollar project according to the New York Times that involved the controversial plan to demolish the building, an example of modernist architecture, considered by Serbs a memorial to the 1999 bombings.
“Now we will have a destroyed building and it’s only a matter of time before the bricks and other parts collapse, because no one will ever touch it again,” said Vucic, who had strongly pushed for the project with President Trump’s family, to whom the Serbian president is asking for economic aid for the country. But the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime has launched an investigation into the mega-deal, and yesterday indicted the minister and the other three on charges of falsifying the document to remove the building’s “cultural heritage status.”
Prosecutors can rely on the ‘confession’ of one of the indicted, the interim director of the institute for the protection of cultural monuments, Goran Vasic, who admitted to having falsified the document. Since the investigation began last May, which could lead to a five-year sentence for the indicted, the project had been blocked. But last month, the Serbian Parliament, controlled by Vucic’s party, approved a law to circumvent the block and remove protections from the building and relaunch the Trump Tower project, a move widely criticized by the judiciary and opposition as the latest provocation after over a year of anti-corruption protests against Vucic.
“We were bombed in 1999, 26 years have passed, now we have found an opportunity and a good investor who is ready to pour in a huge amount of money,” the Serbian president said at the time in an interview with the Times. But in the face of yesterday’s indictments, Kushner’s Affinity Partner decided to step back because, a spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal, “significant projects should unite rather than divide and out of respect for the Serbian people and the city of Belgrade.”
Affinity Partner, largely funded by foreign sovereign wealth funds, had signed a 99-year lease in 2024 for the redevelopment of the site, whose cultural heritage status had been revoked by the Serbian government just one week after Trump’s victory.
The Trump Organization had been working on the Serbian project for years, but there was a clear acceleration after Trump’s electoral victory, despite public protests and the resignations of at least two officials who should have endorsed the decision to remove the building’s protections. Another revealed that Serbian intelligence agents “strongly advised” her to withdraw her opposition: “from the beginning, we knew it was a political decision,” Estela Radonjic Zivkov, former deputy director of the institute for the protection of monuments, told the Times in recent months.
Six months ago, Kushner’s head of legal affairs flew to Belgrade to assess the situation, receiving reassurance from the Serbian government that the dispute over the building’s cultural value would be resolved administratively in the face of a project that, in Vucic’s eyes, would attract more tourists to the capital. “Knowing Trump’s transactional approach, I bet this attracted him,” Dragan Jonic, a member of the Serbian opposition, told the Times.
The anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, in announcing the indictments, also stated that the investigation into other individuals continues, while Vucic seems to confirm his intention to pardon anyone who might be indicted in the case. “I will not give them the opportunity to prosecute those who are not guilty of anything, I am guilty, I was the one who wanted to modernize Serbia, I was the one who wanted to attract a big investor,” he told reporters yesterday.
