Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former US President Donald 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, reported The New York Times.

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, said The New York Times.

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, the so-called General Staff building, destroyed in 1999 by the NATO bombings, according to a member of Parliament in Serbia and Mr. Kushner’s company.

The New York Times said that both these projects involve land now controlled by the governments of Albania and Serbia, meaning a deal would have to be finalized with foreign governments.

A third project, also in Albania, would be built on the Zvernec peninsula, a 1,000-acre coastal area in the south of Albania that is part of the resort community known as Vlore, 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, added The New York Times, 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.

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.”

Since leaving office, Mr. Trump has become a partner in a development project in Oman, a deal he was brought into by a Saudi real estate firm that has ties to the Saudi government.

“No one is ‘giving’ me deals,” said Mr. Kushner, who insisted he was not planning to return to Washington should his father-in-law win the presidency again.

“I operate fairly meticulously, and these investments will create a lot of value for the local communities, our partners and our investors,” he added.

Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump visited Albania twice since Mr. Trump left office. They traveled the country with Mr. Grenell, and even met with Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama.

The leader of the Serbian opposition Ecological Uprising environmental organization, Aleksandar “Cuta” Jovanovic, publicly presented a document that he claims is a memorandum of understanding signed between two American companies and the Serbian Government – represented by outgoing Serbian Minister of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure Goran Vesic. According to the document, the Serbian Government has leased the site in central Belgrade, for a period of 99 years, free of charge, to two American companies, Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC and Kushner Realty, with the possibility of converting the right of use into right of ownership after 99 years.

Vesic has denied signing a memorandum, adding that “the public will be notified when that happens.”