In
a globalized world, free trade rules. And to facilitate
that trade one must have dealers, or what polite society
calls brokers. They might broker energy futures for
Enron, stock trades for Martha Stewart, drugs for rock
musicians - or they might broker weapons.
For
example, consider two of the arms dealers who have been
in the news in the past few years for their role in
facilitating small arms and light weapons sales. Their
role is a vital but unappreciated one. Without them
many, if not most deals would never be consummated. They
perform numerous services, including bringing together
buyer and seller, providing consultation and technical
advice, actual procurement of weapons, contract
negotiation, arrange financing and payment collection,
obtain necessary authorization, and organized
transportation.
Pierre Joseph
Falcone Falcone is of Algerian-French origin,
though he ceased being a French resident in 1977. He was
born in 1954 in Algeria, which was then under French
rule. His father, Pierre Sr, was the mayor of a town
called Bou-Haroun-Alger, ran a fishing fleet and,
according to the French newspaper Le Monde, was involved
in the arms trade. After the Algerian revolution of
1962, the family moved to France, where Falcone lived
until he was 22.
Falcone was taken into custody
on the night of December 2, 2000, per the internment
order of a French special prosecutor. He was initially
charged with illegal arms dealing because he allegedly
brokered sales of Russian-origin weapons to Angola in
1993 and 1994 without authorization from the French
government agency that reviews weapons exports.
Reportedly, in 1993, Falcone, along with his
Russian associate Arcadi Gaydamak, helped arrange the
sale of small arms to Angola worth US$47 million. In
1994, they reportedly arranged a second deal for $563
million worth of weapons, including tanks and
helicopters. But prosecutors later dropped that count
due to a legal technicality. He was placed under
investigation again in April 2002 for illegal arms
trading in the post-1994 period.
News reports
indicate that this stems from years earlier, when, on
December 12, 1996 about 100 tax authority employees and
judiciary police officers searched the offices of
Falcone and later those of Gaydamak.
The
National Tax Investigation Office launched the operation
that led to two criminal indictments. The first
indictment, handed down in April 1999, dealt with
Gaydamak's personal property; the second, in June 2000,
took on the ZTS-Osos company, which was co-managed by
Falcone and Gaydamak. This is the company that exported
weapons to Angola.
The Angolan government
officially turned to Russia in 1993 after the UNITA
rebellious group renewed its struggle against it. They
agreed on arms deliveries to be repaid by Angola with
oil.
Prior to his arrest, Falcone headed the
group of companies under the umbrella "Brenco
International" and simultaneously was a broker for the
part-private, part-French government-run agency Societe
Francaise d'Exportation de Materiels et Services du
Ministere de l'Interieur (French Company for the Export
of Goods, Systems & Services - SOFREMI), controlled
by the French Interior Ministry then headed by Charles
Pasqua. Pasqua was interior minister - effectively the
country's top law enforcer - from 1986 to 1988 and again
between 1993 and 1995.
French judicial officials
found that Brenco made payments to a number of his
associates. Jean-Christophe Mitterand, son of former
French president Francois Mitterand, acknowledges
receiving $1.8 million into his numbered Swiss bank
account, but says that the money was for consulting work
unrelated to Angolan arms sales.
According to
The Washington Post, Falcone's company, Brenco
International, brokered arms deals involving the sale of
surplus Russian military equipment to the Angolan
government. The first deal was worth approximately $47
million and took place on November 7, 1993, while a
second deal, worth some $563 million, took place in
1994. In both cases, the weapons purchases were
reportedly paid for with Angolan proceeds from oil sales
- with Sonangol, Angola's state oil company, for
example, paying some of the money for the 1994
transaction to French bank accounts controlled by a
Czech firm, ZTS OSOS, which provided some of the
weapons. By late 1994, according to Le Monde, Falcone
had been involved in the selling of weapons to Angola
worth some $633 million.
Gaydamak said that he
had been told to contact the Slovak ZTS OSOS Company,
which existed since the late 1940s and was a licensed
arms exporter. About 44% of the company is owned by the
Russian Kurganmash Company and the Russian state-owned
arms exporting Rosoboronexport.
Given all the
fuss over the weapons shipments, it is ironic that it is
not clear that the weapons represented a great deal for
Angola. The issue of arms supplies to Angola in the
1990s was dogged by claims of low quality. Some claims
report the delivery of tanks and of other heavy
equipment, of such low quality that they had to be
removed from their delivery vessels by chains, whereupon
they were transported to "tank graveyards" outside the
capital Luanda.
After being in jail for a year
from December 1, 2000, Falcone was let out of prison.
Since then the government of Angola appointed him their
ambassador to the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization. When he is not hobnobbing
with other UN functionaries or running one of his other
businesses, he lives in his luxury home in Paradise
Valley, Arizona.
Leonid Efimovich
Minin Think what you will of Falcone, but at
least he had some class, even if it is the kind that you
buy at Tiffany's. That's more than you can say for some
of his arms brokering peers. Consider, for example,
Leonid Efimovich Minin.
On August 5, 2000,
Italian police raided the Hotel Europa near Milan and
arrested Leonid Minin, a 52-year-old Israeli
industrialist on drug charges. He was found in bed with
four prostitutes and 58 grams of cocaine. Minin is, in
fact, an Israeli citizen with a real Israeli passport,
but also has passports from the former Soviet Union,
Russia, Germany and Bolivia. He was born December 14,
1947.
Minin's story begins in his native Odessa.
He emigrated to Israel in the 1970s as part of a large
local exodus, but when he went into business after the
Soviet Union's collapse, making his first millions from
trading oil out of Russia, he used his Odessa contacts.
Minin was an associate of Alexander Angert, nicknamed
The Angel, a notoriously violent Odessa godfather who
now lives in London. Angert helped run the port's
lucrative oil business and extortion rackets and served
12 years of a 15-year term for murder in the Ukraine.
By 1993, Minin was based in Italy before
establishing a timber business registered in Zug in
Switzerland and opening offices in Monrovia and Tel
Aviv. By 1998, he was immersed in the guns and gems
trade.
When Minin was arrested police found a
briefcase with 1,500 pages of documents that revealed
his role in supplying Ukrainian weapons to Liberia,
despite an arms embargo which had been imposed by the
United Nations in 1992 and was subsequently tightened in
March 2001 to stop arms from reaching Revolutionary
United Front (RUF) rebels in Sierra Leone, which is also
subject to such an embargo. The documents - which
included fake End-User Certificates, copies of money
transfers, copies of fax messages, and correspondence -
all pointed to his heavy involvement in illegal arms
trafficking to Africa; specifically arming the RUF in
Sierra Leone through Liberia and also Liberia itself.
In 2000, Minin was subsequently tried and
convicted in Italy and sentenced to two years in prison
for possession of drugs. After Minin's appeal failed,
Walter Mapelli, the public prosecutor, turned his
attention to investigating the documents found in
Minin's luggage that threw light on his arms sales.
Minin owned Limad, the Monaco-based company, that
apparently exported oil from Odessa, Ukraine and the
aircraft that ferried the weapons in 1999 from Burkina
Faso to Liberia.
On March 13, 1999, a Ukrainian
Antonov 124, one of the world's largest aircraft, landed
in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso. A smaller
aircraft bearing the logo of the Seattle Supersonics
basketball team arrived and started offloading and
ferrying away the Antonov's cargo, which included
anti-tank weapons, surface-to-air missiles,
rocket-propelled grenades and their launchers, 715 boxes
of guns and cartridges and 408 boxes of cartridge
powder.
More cargo was loaded on to trucks and
driven to a nearby town, where witnesses saw the same
Supersonics aircraft come and, load by load, ferry the
cargo away. In nearby Liberia, others saw the same
aircraft repeatedly land and unload. In Monrovia, the
capital, the aircraft was a common sight.
It did
not take long for diplomats in west Africa to figure out
what was happening: a sanctions-busting delivery of
weapons to the RUF, the rebel army fighting a brutal war
for control of Sierra Leone's diamond mines. Liberia's
support for the RUF despite a UN arms embargo was
already well known.
Queried by the UN in April
1999, Ukraine's government admitted the Antonov had been
loaded with Ukrainian weapons. But Ukrainian officials
insisted they had made a legal sale to Burkina Faso's
defense ministry; Burkina Faso officials claimed they
still had the weapons in their possession.
A UN
panel of experts was able to trace the aircraft with the
Supersonics logo. It had been retired by the sports
team, sold and resold, ending up in the ownership of
Limad, a Monaco company that apparently exported oil
from Odessa, Ukraine.
On July 15, 2000 - while
the UN investigation continued - another Antonov 124
landed in west Africa, this time in Abidjan, capital of
Ivory Coast. As UN investigators would later establish,
the aircraft carried 113 tons of 7.62-millimetre
cartridges, used for AK-47s, destined for Liberia.
The 2000 shipment involved another trafficker,
the Indian-Kenyan-British Sanjivan Ruprah. It was one of
his companies, West Africa Air Services, planes that
carried the ammo. The cargo plane, rented by Kiev's
Antonov Design Bureau, left Gostomel, in the Ukraine, on
July 14, 2000. According to the UN panel of experts:
"In November 1999 Ruprah was authorized by the
Liberian Minister of Transport to act as the 'Global
Civil Aviation agent worldwide' for the Liberian Civil
Aviation Regulatory Authority, and to 'investigate and
regularize the ... Liberian Civil Aviation register'.
During its visit to Liberia the panel asked the
Transport Ministry, the Ministry of Justice and police
authorities about Ruprah and his work, but was told that
he was not known to them. Ruprah is, in fact, a
well-known arms dealer. He travels using a Liberian
diplomatic passport in the name of Samir M Nasr, and
carries additional authorization from the Liberian
International Ship and Corporate Registry."
On
June 4, 2001, Ruprah was listed as one of 130 persons (a
list which has since been revised by the UN with some
original names and key players being dropped) banned by
the UN Security Council for their role in fueling the
decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone.
Valery
Cherny, a Russian arms broker, who ran a business called
Aviatrend and brokered the buying of weapons for the
Ivory Coast deal was a partner of Minin. He had
purchased the bullets from Ukraine and chartered the
Antonov 124. The bullets were ferried to Liberia in an
Ilyushin 18 leased by Liberia from the Moldovan air
cargo company Renan, which had previously worked for
Russian arms trader Victor Bout.
Among the bank
accounts used to pay for the weapons was one at
Budapest's Central European International Bank, the
Hungarian branch of the Italian BCI of the Banca Intesa
Group. The account bears the name of the Engineering and
Technical Company (ETC), and is managed by two
Bulgarians: Alexandar Tudorov and Nadia Petkova.
Included among the ETC beneficiaries were Zimbabwe
Defense Industry, connected with the army of Zimbabwe, a
country presently under a EU embargo, ZDIits general
manager Dube, the wife of the former Interior Minister
of Harare, Zodwa Dagengwa, Arsenal, the controversial
Bulgarian company, Air Foyle, which is linked to Bout,
and Vab Impex, the company implicated in the
Falcone/Gaydamak arms shipment to Angola scandal.
The Ukrainian government claimed that they broke
no laws as they had no knowledge that arms were being
diverted from their intended destination. And insofar as
their claim that they followed procedure is concerned
the Ukrainian government is correct. In an interview
with the television program Frontline UN arms trade
experts Johan Peleman said the following in an
interview:
"In Ukraine, government officials
told us that, from their perspective, Ukraine did
everything legally required regarding the arms Minin
exported to Liberia. I would fully agree with that ...
Even more than that, they followed the international
procedures for an arms deal. They went beyond it,
sending someone with the plane. They even went beyond
that, having a document signed by the client, in this
case Cote d'Ivoire, that the ammunition would be used
... within the terms of the embargo or the moratorium on
small arms in West Africa. So this was an additional
guarantee. Strictly speaking, they followed the right
procedures."
As detailed in a report by the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
(ICIJ), on June 20, 2001, Minin was charged with weapons
trafficking, and for delivering a hundred tons of
weapons, spare parts, ammunition and explosives to the
Revolutionary United Front. Minin was charged with using
false end-user certificates, and for delivering 68 tons
of weaponry from Eastern Europe supposedly destined for
Burkina Faso, whose military does not use ex-Warsaw Pact
weaponry, and 113 tons marked for the Ivory Coast, to
Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The United Nations,
which was also investigating Minin's involvement in arms
trading, provided background that helped Italian
authorities make sense of Minin's role in two operations
alluded to in Minin's documents. In December 2000, a
panel of UN experts determined that there was
"conclusive evidence of supply lines to Liberia through
Burkina Faso". Their report noted, "Weapons supplied to
Burkina Faso by governments or private arms merchants
have been systematically diverted for use in the
conflict in Sierra Leone. For example, a shipment of 68
tons of weapons arrived at Ouagadougou on March 12,
1999. They were temporarily off-loaded in Ouagadougou
and some were trucked to Bobo Dioulasso. The bulk of
them were trans-shipped within a matter of days to
Liberia. Most were flown aboard a BAC-111 owned by an
Israeli businessman of Ukranian origin, Leonid Minin."
According to the documents provided by the
Ukranian government, the weapons were transported from
Kiev to Ouagadougou aboard flight ADB1737, an
Antonov-124 (registration UR-82008). The deal included
3,000 AKM (Kalashnikov) assault rifles, fifty machine
guns, 25 rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs), five
Strela-3 (also known as SA-7) missiles, and five Metis
anti-tank guided missile systems, as well as ammunition
for these weapons.
Most were flown aboard a
plane owned by Minin. In late 1998, Minin turned over
his personal jet to Liberian president Charles Taylor
for use as his presidential plane. The aircraft - a $2
million, 27-seat BAC 1-11 that Minin bought through an
Orlando, Florida-based firm called Cortran International
- had previously served as the team plane for the NBA's
Seattle Supersonics. Taylor was so anxious to use it
that he never bothered to paint over the club's insignia
on the tail.
The aircraft flew from Ibiza in
Spain to Robertsfield in Liberia on March 8, 1999. On
March 15, two days after the arrival of the Ukrainian
weapons in Ouagadougou, the plane flew from Monrovia to
Ouagadougou. On March 15, the plane was loaded with
weapons and flew back to Liberia. On the 17th it
returned to Ouagadougou. After a flight to Abidjan in
the Ivory Coast, the plane flew again from Ouagadougou
to Liberia with weapons on the 19th. On the 25th the
plane flew again from Liberia to Ouagadougou and
returned on the same day with weapons. On the 27th the
plane flew again to Ouagadougou and from there to Bobo
Dioulasso for the weapons that had been trucked there.
The aircraft made three flights over the next three days
between Bobo Dioulasso and Liberia. On March 31 the
plane flew back to Spain. Because the plane had a VIP
configuration, it had only limited cargo capacity, which
is why so many flights were necessary.
Minin's
plane was used for an earlier shipment of weapons and
related equipment from Niamey Airport in Niger to
Monrovia. This was in December 1998, shortly after Minin
purchased the plane and started to operate it in the
region. On December 22, 1998 the plane made two trips
from Niamey to Monrovia. On the second trip, it took a
consignment of weapons, probably from existing stocks of
the armed forces of Niger. The weapons were off-loaded
into vehicles of the Liberian military. A few days after
these events, the RUF rebels started a major offensive
that eventually resulted in a destructive January 1999
raid on Freetown, the capitol of Sierra Leone.
Those shipments violated international
sanctions. In 1992, the United Nations slapped a less
than effective arms embargo on the RUF. Arms continued
to reach the movement through Liberia, which led the
United Nations to put that country under an embargo in
1992 with the intention of preventing the arms
trafficking to the RUF.
Documentation provided
by the Ukraine government to the United Nations shows
that the weapons were part of a contract between a
Gibraltar-based company representing the Ministry of
Defense of Burkina Faso and the Ukrainian State-owned
company Ukrspetsexport. An aircraft of the British
company Air Foyle, acting as an agent for the Ukrainian
air carrier Antonov Design Bureau, shipped the cargo,
under a contract with the Gibraltar-based company,
Chartered Engineering and Technical Services. A
Ukrainian license for sale of the weaponry was granted
after Ukrspetsexport had received an end-user
certificate (EUC) from the Ministry of Defense of
Burkina Faso.
The EUC was dated February 10,
1999. It authorized the Gibraltar-based company to
purchase the weapons for sole use of the Ministry of
Defense of Burkina Faso. The document also certified
that Burkina Faso would be the final destination of the
cargo and the end-user of the weaponry.
But the
arms did not remain in Burkina Faso. At first, Burkina
Faso denied to the United Nations that the weapons were
meant for Liberia, but later admitted the truth to the
UN investigators.
According to the
non-governmental organization Global Witness Iin early
2000 Minin also brokered an arms deal between former
Russian test pilot Valery Cherny's Moscow-based company
Aviatrend, and then president General Robert Guei of
Cote d'Ivoire, which included 10,500 AK47 assault
rifles, RPG-26 rocket launchers, and over 8 million
rounds of assorted ammunition.
Guei, fearful of
the elections results set for September, ordered, via
Aviatrend, 113 tons of arms from the Ukrainian State
Company "Spetsehnoexport". The goods were delivered on
July 12 in Minin's plane.
According to this, on
May 26, 1999, Guei authorized the following to be bought
in his name: 5 million rounds of 76 2x39mm Ball
ammunition; 50 M93 30mm grenade launchers; 10,000 30mm
bombs for M93 launcher; and 20 thermal image binoculars.
Minin was released in September 2002.
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