JOY SLOVAKIA AND "OUR BEST INTERESTS"

Helicopters were in great demand among the warring regimes and movements in Africa and the best supplier was the existing network of arms traffickers from the former USSR and East Europe. The organizational work needed to deliver these items was immense, but not insurmountable.

On 2 July 2000 the LOT helicopter repair plant at Trencin in Slovakia signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan for the repair and refurbishment of two Mi-24 helicopter gunships belonging to Kyrgyzstan. The arrangements had been made by the Kyrgyz Defense attache in Moscow, Major General Urazmatov. The first Mi-24 arrived in Slovakia in late June 2000 aboard an Il-76 (registration number TL-ACU) with the approval of the Slovak Defense Ministry. It was repaired and flew back to Kyrgyzstan. The second Mi-24 arrived in October 2000 and was to have been picked up by an Il-76 in February 2001. The transportation in both cases had been arranged through the private airline company Centrafrican Airlines.

However, the Slovak authorities became suspicious. Their inquiries turned up some interesting facts. The Ministry of Defense of Kyrgyzstan was not aware that any of its helicopters were to be repaired in Slovakia. In fact, the helicopters in question had been sold to an arms broker, Alexander Islamov. The repair contract in Trencin set up by Major General Urazmatov was done without the knowledge of the Ministry of Defense of Kyrgyzstan. The second Mi-24 was then grounded.

Soon after the grounding of the Mi-24 Peter Jusko, a Slovak businessman representing a company called Pecos arrived in Trencin claiming the Mi-24 helicopter belonged to him. Jusko was already known to Slovak authorities as the director of an arms brokerage called Joy Slovakia. As the UN Panel of experts later learned, one of the directors of Joy Slovakia was Alexander Islamov, the same person who had bought the helicopters from Kyrgyzstan. The UN also learned that Joy Slovakia had done business with the Slovak military in the past. The Ministry had once sold them small arms destined for Guinea. The UN experts were even shown a copy of the end user certificate for the deal with Guinea. But the arms were never delivered to Guinea nor even ordered by them. The end user certificate which Joy Slovakia had presented was a forgery. The weapons had been smuggled into Liberia.

The second Il-76 airplane, who's mission was to transport the now grounded helicopter in Slovakia, had been registered in the Republic of the Congo and in the Central African Republic. Requests for landing the Il-76 in Slovakia had come from the company MoldTransavia in Moldova and the billing address for the airplane was in the United Arab Emirates. As it turned out, the Il-76 was owned by one Victor Bout, a Moldovan gangster, a friend of Leonid Minin, and gun runner who also was the owner of Centrafrican airlines which shared the same address (P.O. Box 2190 in Ajman) in the United Arab Emirates with another Bout front, Transavia Travel Agency and San Air General Trading which is owned by one Yuriy Denisenko. In March 2001 San Air and Centrafrican Airlines moved to new offices in the Ajman Freezone and now are part of the entity known as CET Aviation Enterprise.

This Il-76 picked up the first helicopter which had been repaired in Slovakia on 2 August 2000 and filed a flight plan back to Kyrgyzstan. However, it arrived in Kyrgyzstan only on 22 August from Tbilisi and then only for a fuel stop and departed to Conarky in Guinea. But flight controller's logs show that it never went to Guinea, instead it landed at Roberts International Airport in Liberia. All evidence points to the fact that it delivered the Mi-24 there.

These elaborate and well planned operations to break the United Nations arms embargo in effect for Liberia required many different skills and players. End User certificates had to be forged and notarized, shell companies set up, insurance purchased, pilots and crews hired and government officials bribed and the arms had to be purchased. The proceeds from the sales had to be laundered or, in the case of payment by diamonds which had no certificate of origin, the diamonds had to be resold on the black market. In other cases where payment was made by providing favorable concessions for timber operations, elaborate logging and shipping expertise was needed. For example, among the documents found in Leonid Minin's hotel room after his arrest, were a number of maps showing that he was negotiating the possibilities for a vast timber concession in north-west Liberia. Minin's timber business never became profitable however and he sold his equipment to a company owned by his partner in Forum Liberia, a Spanish owned company. Minin also tried to introduce a Ukrainian businessman, Vadym Rabinovych, to the timber business in Liberia and arranged for Rabinovych's visit to Liberia. The United Nations panel of experts interviewed Mr. Rabinovych in Ukraine, but nothing is available at this time on what they found. Rabinovych is alleged to have been a one time associate of Semyon Mogilevich, a well known figure in Russian and transnational organized crime.

Such a large scale smuggling operation could not take place without the covert support of government officials both in Africa and East Europe. The African role of President Charles Taylor of Liberia and his son are clear and well documented, as are the activities of officials in the Ivory Coast. It is also quite evident that high officials in Ukraine, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan and Slovakia knew, or at least suspected, that the embargo was being broken by their citizens, but chose not to stop them.

The letter dated 12 February 1993 from the head of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) Yevhen Marchuk to Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk is one example of such behavior. The SBU knew that illegal arms sales were taking place. They knew the players, they had evidence that high officials in the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense were demanding, and getting bribes for their role in this activity. They also knew that many weapons were being sold and the buyers did not even have forged end user certificates; there were no certificates at all. It seems from the above mentioned letter that the main concern of the Ukrainian authorities was that the weapons were being sold at a very low price. This was in 1993.

By 1998 there is evidence to show that the new administration of President Kuchma also was aware of such practices but took no action. The former Mayor of Odessa, Edward Hurvitz, in an interview in 2001 for the Internet publication "Criminal Ukraine" openly stated that : "I know for a fact that Bodelan, (Ruslan Bodelan, the present Mayor of Odessa and President Kuchma's confident) Zhukov, Hryhorenko, Anhel and Minin were part of one group. They went to Italy together, lived in villas there together. All of the cities money they transferred to the Maritime Transport Bank (bank owned by Zhukov)." When asked if such arms sales are possible without the approval of authorities in Kyiv, Hurvitz replied: "I don't believe that. Furthermore, the arms business today is totally criminalized. Here you will find the business interests of a number of institutions coming together."

In Slovakia, the police and intelligence services knew about Joy Slovakia and that its founder, Peter Jusko, was involved in shady arms deals. The military in Slovakia had even done business with him and sold him with arms on the basis of a fake end user certificate. Yet the Slovak authorities did not bother to arrest Mr. Jusko. The same behavior was evident in Moldova and Kyrgyzstan where officials turned a blind eye to arms sales and preferred to see hard currency earnings instead.

All the governments concerned in these arms sales knew very well that the weaponry was going to a region in Africa where a conflict was taking place and arms were in great demand. And even if the fake end user certificates stated that the end user was to be a country not on the embargo list, it should have alerted the intelligence officials to be extra vigilant. They ignored this and chose to make the disingenuous argument they still use to this day that "they were acting in the best interests of their country."

Roman Kupchinsky,
Breaking the Embargo part 3. (CCT # 5)