On May 1st, 2009, the Cerro de la Muerte or 'Summit of Death' in Costa Rica lived grimly up to its name. At around 11 a.m. on that day local authorities received an alert about a helicopter accident on the mountain. The following day the aircraft – a Bell Jet Ranger, registration number TI-BBT – was located in the middle of the forest, eight kilometres from the village of Villa Mills. Thanks to the inhospitable Central American jungle terrain, however, it took another day before rescuers could arrive at the crash site. It was in vain: the two occupants of the helicopter, pilot Edgar Arguedas Alfaro and a passenger called German Trejo Retamosa, were both already dead. But local police were nonetheless in for a major surprise: for in addition to the two men the helicopter was also carrying 396 kilos of cocaine.
According to authorities in Costa Rica and the United States this accident has led to a better understanding of the inner workings of a vast network of cocaine supply carried out on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico. This is one of the most powerful criminal organisations in the world whose boss, Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, is known internationally for having escaped from his Mexican jail through a 1.5 kilometre tunnel. He has since been re-arrested and is now awaiting extradition to the United States. From Mexico Guzmán and his cartel controlled up to 35% of the cocaine produced in Colombia.
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The pilot of the doomed helicopter was a former Costa Rican police officer who had in the past taken part in several anti-drugs operations. According to investigators, three Mexicans who had reserved rooms in an hotel in the small mountain town of Turrialba in Costa Rica, the presumed delivery point for the cocaine, fled as soon as news of the accident was made public in the press, heading for Panama.
On its own this story, which took place some 9,000 kilometres from Paris, could have been simply another episode in the grim and tragic story of international cocaine smuggling, an event worthy of the US television series Narcos or perhaps the meticulously-researched novel 'The Power of the Dog' by thriller writer Don Winslow. But the story has another twist.
For according to an investigation by Mediapart, the money behind the Costa Rican helicopter and its 396 kilos of cocaine is directly linked to the carbon trading fraud in Europe, which represents the biggest fraud that France has ever experienced. Other flows of money, identified thanks to official documents and other evidence, have also enabled a link to be made between the carbon trading affair and one of the main Colombian drug lords, Jorge Milton Cifuentes Villa, an associate of El Chapo's inside the Sinaloa Cartel.
After a trail of murders in Paris, links between some of the fraudsters and the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and after suspicions of police corruption and the fiasco of the French state in the face of the unprecedented fraud, the carbon trading scandal now takes on a new dimension.
However, at the beginning the fraud was all about the money. Taking advantage of some gaping faults in the regulatory system, several teams of Franco-Israeli fraudsters, sometimes associated with members of organised crime, managed within the space of just eight months between 2008 and 2009 to plunder the market in carbon quotas, an emissions trading scheme set up as part of the fight against climate change.
The resulting fraud cost French taxpayers at least 1.7 billion euros with the overall impact at European level estimated at 5 billion euros. In fact the French Ministry of Finance has never calculated the true cost of the fraud in any detail, with the only estimate available coming from the spending and financial watchdog the Cour des Comptes. Some experts who have worked on the case believe that the real losses to France could be as high as 3 billion euros. This helps explain why the affair has been dubbed the “heist of the century”.
So far around 15 criminal investigations have been opened in Paris, Lyon and Marseille, all run by customs investigators, who have still not finished with this fraud almost ten yeas after the events took place. Several trials have taken place, including the much-publicised court case involving French businessman Arnaud Mimran, involving a fraud which alone pocketed some 283 million euros. But two other wide-ranging investigations involving other networks - cases known by the names “Crépuscule” and “Energie Groupe” - are also in progress. It is on the margins of these two affairs that offshore companies emerged which turned out to have financial links with the Sinaloa Cartel and cocaine trafficking.
To understand the cases one must first pierce through the mysteries of a vast labyrinth of paper whose walls are made from money, bank accounts and fictitious contracts. At the top of the pyramid are Crépuscule and Energie Groupe, two certified companies in the carbon quota market who, through an expert three-card trick involving VAT, siphoned off money from French state coffers. According to judicial investigators the first company creamed off 156 million euros and the second 385 million. Between the summer of 2008 and the winter of 2009 the companies siphoned off a total of 38.3 million euros into an offshore shell company in Panama called Perla Capital, whose bank accounts were opened in Turkey.
Perla Capital is what is known as a 'taxi' or 'carousal' company in that it is simply used to transfer dirty money from point A to point B. Its beneficiary is, or was, a man called Msiaad S., also known in Israel under the name Avner S. Originally from Djerba in Tunisia, Msiaad S. died in 2011 from prostate cancer. On top of the 38.3 million euros received by his company Perla Capital, he also received 2.2 million euros personally from the company Crépuscule. Officially a specialist in gold trading, Msiaad S. was above all known in Paris circles for being an expert in “withdrawing” money, in other words moving cash whose origin and destination are not in complete conformity with the law.
Follow the money
According to statements and documents obtained by French customs officials, Msiaad S. also had close links with another company that received money from the carbon trading fraud, a shell company called Sahara International LLC set up in the United Arab Emirates. Some 3.3 million euros from Crépuscule arrived in its coffers, having first passed through three other 'carousal' companies. The aim of this circuitous route was to provided a smokescreen and make the money harder to trace.
> The complex trail between the carbon trading scam and the Sinaloa Cartel:
However, French customs officers had a stroke of good fortune when they googled the name 'Sahara International'. For they came across an article in the Argentinian daily newspaper La Nación which stated that this company was partly responsible for the purchase of the cocaine-laden helicopter that had crashed in Costa Rica. After some research the investigators find that Sahara International had indeed funded part of the cost of the helicopter just before its illegal and fatal crash. Even better, after combing through the Turkish bank accounts held by Msiaad S.'s other company, Perla Capital, investigators discovered that the Florida-based seller of the helicopter, Régis M., received the rest of the money owed for the sale – 310,000 dollars – in the days preceding the accident.
This link seems not to have been pure chance. At the end of 2008 additional payments totalling 340,000 dollars from Perla Capital's bank accounts funded three apparently unrelated Latin American companies: Comercializadora Empresarial Team (a property firm in Ecuador), Red Mundial Immobiliara SA de CV (a property firm in Mexico) and Cubi Cafe Clik Mexico (which distributed coffee in Central America). These three companies had one grim factor in common: they have all been designated by the US Treasury Department and drugs enforcement agencies as fronts for laundering dirty money for cocaine lord Jorge Milton Cifuentes Villa.
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Born in Medellín in Colombia in 1965, Cifuentes Villa is one of the big names in the cocaine trade in Latin America. His family has been involved in Columbian drugs smuggling for thirty years, having been involved in the criminal networks of the Medellín Cartel and its successor organisation, Oficina de Envigado, plus the Norte del Valle Carte and the paramilitary organisation the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia.
In addition to Jorge Milton, the Cifuentes Villa clan includes the late Francisco, the former personal pilot of drugs baron Pablo Escobar, who was killed in 2007; Fernando, who was associated with the Cali Cartel; and Dolly, who was arrested and extradited to the United States in 2012, and who is best-known for having had two children with Jaime Alberto Uribe Vélez, the brother of former Columbian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez. The Cifuentes Villa clan is reputed to operate in many countries: Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Mexico, Costa Rica and Spain.
Jorge Milton Cifuentes Villa was on the list of priority targets for the American justice system, with a five-million-dollar reward offered for information leading to his whereabouts and he was finally arrested in Venezuela in November 2012. He has since been sent to the United States where he is suspected of having imported onto American soil more than 30 tonnes of cocaine by different means: fishing boats, speedboats, aeroplanes and helicopters. The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) considers Jorge Milton Cifuentes Villa as one of the key figures who enabled El Chapo to dominate cocaine trafficking on a global scale.
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However, a major mystery still remains: who inside the carbon trading mafia was pulling the strings in relation to the links with the Latin American drugs cartels? At this stage it is simply not possible to say. None of the key figures in the Crépuscule and Energie Groupe cases who have been placed under formal investigation have come under the investigators' spotlight in connection with this section of the enquiry. Nor do informed sources consider the man who facilitated the flow of money, Msiaad S., as having had the criminal stature to take on such a role. “He was a guy who moved money for crooks but not an international cocaine trafficker. There are people behind it, that's for sure, but who?” wonders someone close to the case who asked not to be identified.
Turkey's second biggest private bank, Türkiye Garanti Bankası A.Ş., through which Msiaad S.'s money circulated, was placed under formal investigation in May 2015 by French anti-corruption judge Guillaume Daieff for an “operation of concealment and converting the product of fraud” and was placed under the status of “assisted witness” in relation to money laundering. This witness status, peculiar to French law, implies that there is evidence suggesting the implication of the ‘assisted witness’ in a suspected crime, but that there is not what the French code of law defines as “serious or corroborating” evidence of involvement in a crime, criteria which are necessary for a suspect to be formally placed under investigation.
When the French judge asked a legal director at the bank about the tens of millions of euros from the massive carbon trading fraud which had circulated with no difficulty in his establishment, the director replied simply: “We didn't have the means to prevent it.” However, he said they had put an end to their relationship with Msiaad S. after having learnt from a reporter that some Turkish funds possibly coming from his bank had been mentioned in the South American press. This was in relation to the crashed helicopter and its cargo of nearly 400 kilos of drugs.
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- The French version of this story can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter