As chief executive of his family’s real estate empire, Jared Kushner planned two apartment projects across the street from each other in Jersey City.

Both would be luxury skyscrapers, complete with retail space and sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline. A new crosswalk would connect them, intended to link the two Kushner Cos. developments practically and visually.

But when Kushner, 36, prepared an ethics plan ahead of joining the White House as a top adviser to his father-in-law, President Donald Trump, he drew a curious distinction between the two projects. He sold his stake in one, while keeping his share of up to $5 million in the other.

Kushner, who is emerging as a singularly powerful figure in the White House, is keeping nearly 90 percent of his vast real estate holdings even after resigning from the family business and pledging a clear divide between his private interests and public duties.

The value of his retained real estate interests is between $132 million and $407 million and could leave him in a position to financially benefit from his family’s business.

The documents reflect the opaque decisions that Kushner and his lawyers made to allow him to keep much of his outside investments while seeking to remain within the boundaries that government ethics officials would find acceptable.

Kushner’s form lists hundreds of private companies. Some of the investments he kept are held by shell companies that are virtually impossible to track, and Kushner has declined to make public more information on those entities.

The 124 real estate assets that Kushner has kept include residential real estate in suburban Maryland, a Times Square retail complex, and apartments across the Midwest, from Toledo to the small town of Speedway, Indiana. Kushner also kept his stake in a New Jersey mobile-home park.

His decision to divest from one of the Jersey City projects, One Journal Square, gained attention earlier this month after his sister appeared at a conference in China promoting the use of a special U.S. visa program to lure investors for the development and publicly noting her brother’s connection to the president.

The White House said Kushner had recused himself from discussions of the EB-5 visa program.

It is not clear from Kushner’s financial filings whether any of his holdings might intersect with his broad and evolving responsibilities in the White House. This week, Kushner has been close by the president during the administration’s first international trip, with stops in Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, Belgium and Italy.

Kushner rejected a request to review his ethics agreement with the White House, which would lay out the topics that he has pledged to avoid because of concerns about conflicts of interest. White House officials have said that it is a long-standing policy for the agreements to remain confidential.

As a result, ethics experts say, Kushner is asking Americans to take his word for it.

“Right now, the only thing that the public has is the assurances from the White House that everybody is complying with ethics rules,” said Don Fox, a former general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics.

Kushner declined to comment for this story. One of his attorneys, former Clinton administration Justice Department official Jamie Gorelick, said that they were “striving for simplicity” in choosing what assets to sell and which ones to keep in order to minimize potential areas of conflict.

For instance, Kushner sold his interests in the company’s landmark 666 Fifth Ave. building in Manhattan, because it may be refinanced and posed many uncertainties.

He also sold his interests in a venture capital firm because of its investments in broad sectors of the economy, including a health care company. Had he kept his interests, Kushner might have needed to recuse himself from discussions related to health care or risk violating a conflicts of interest statute.

“Jared takes the ethics rules very seriously and would never compromise himself or the administration,” said Joshua Raffel, his spokesman.

Kushner sold some assets to a trust controlled by his mother. But his lawyers have declined to provide details about other buyers, except to say that they include other family members and third-party buyers.

Kushner’s team has said that he may sell more of his holdings. Additionally, they are filing an updated disclosure form to correct several omissions related to positions and stakes in assets that he did not previously list on his form.