Serbian president threatens reprisals after plans for Belgrade Trump Tower thwarted

Original article by Tom Burgis

Serbia’s authoritarian ruler has threatened reprisals after protesters and a prosecutor thwarted plans for a Trump Tower in Belgrade.

In a rare setback for the Trump family’s global moneymaking campaign, the $500m development was abandoned after Monday’s indictment of a Serbian minister on suspicion of abusing his office to support the project.

“We have lost an exceptional investment,” Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia’s embattled president, said on Tuesday. “I will personally ensure that everyone who participated in causing this damage is held accountable.”

Vučić, whose cosiness with Russia’s Vladimir Putin has left him few western allies, had personally courted the Trumps. But thousands of demonstrators have staged protests at the site of the proposed hotel and apartment building, a historically resonant spot long off-limits to developers.

A spokesperson for Affinity Partners, an investment company run by Trump’s son-in-law and diplomatic envoy, Jared Kushner, which was developing the buildings alongside the Trump Organization, said: “Because meaningful projects should unite rather than divide, and out of respect for the people of Serbia and the City of Belgrade, we are withdrawing our application and stepping aside at this time.”

Since Donald Trump won back the White House 13 months ago, his sons have struck a spree of deals from the Gulf to Vietnam that have helped to swell the family’s income to an estimated $864m in the first half of this year alone. The president’s financial disclosures show that, while Donald Trump Jr and Eric are formally in charge of the Trump Organization, profits still flow to their father.

The Trumps’ critics call it “pay to play”: the perception that enriching the first family can buy the president’s favour. The White House has responded to questions whether commercial considerations have influenced pardons, technology transfers, sanctions relief and tariff reductions by insisting that “neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest”.

The Trumps have mulled adding a Belgrade property to their international portfolio since at least 2013. In 2024, Kushner came to Serbia to announce that one was finally to be built. In January, days after Trump’s inauguration, Eric revealed it would bear the family name.

Two months later, Trump Jr was in Belgrade to see Vučić. While Serbians were filling the streets with protests against his regime’s alleged corruption and incompetence, the president and Trump Jr enjoyed what Vučić called a “cordial conversation” about “bilateral relations” – comments that suggested blurred lines between business and geopolitics. Yet the project was already in trouble.

The site had protected status as a place of cultural heritage. Once a gem of modernist architecture, it was preserved as the ruins of the genocidal Slobodan Milošević regime’s military headquarters, bombed by Nato in 1999.

Nine days after Trump’s November 2024 election victory, the Vučić regime revoked this protected status. But the necessary paperwork had been falsified, the head of the cultural heritage institute said after his arrest in May. Vučić spoke darkly of “corrupt gangs” of prosecutors bringing “fabricated cases”.

But the prosecutor, Mladen Nenadić, pressed on. He made further arrests, culminating on Monday in the indictment of Vučić’s culture minister, Nikola Selaković, and other officials “in connection with the illegalities in the removal of the status of cultural property” from the site of the planned Trump Tower.

Selaković denies wrongdoing. None of these allegations relate to the Trumps’ conduct or Kushner’s.

Vučić said on Tuesday that those who opposed the Trump Tower wanted to “destroy Serbia”. The country faces an energy crisis after the Trump administration in October imposed sanctions on its Russian-owned oil refinery.

Estela Radonjic Zivkov, an official at the heritage institute who defied pressure from agents of the state security agency to support the project, welcomed the decision to abandon the project. She told the Guardian: “This decision demonstrates that public interest, the rule of law, and professional integrity cannot be permanently overridden by political will and private interests.”