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« Reply #5619 on: August 15, 2016, 04:30:37 pm » |
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Montenegro Opens Weapons Supply Line to Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia’s state-of-the-art military has emerged
as an unlikely buyer of Montenegro’s vast stockpiles of surplus arms and
ammunition. The deals were arranged through a powerful, Montenegrin
arms broker, already embroiled in controversy surrounding a questionable
privatisation and allegations of sanctions-busting in Libya.
Since
August 2015, Montenegro Defence Industry (MDI) has exported 250 tonnes
of ammunition and 10,000 anti-tank systems to Saudi Arabia, which has no
history of buying or using second-hand Eastern European and
Soviet-style equipment.
The arms exported match weapons and
ammunition bought by MDI in 2015 from stockpiles deemed “outdated and of
no future use” for Montenegro’s small army.
With some 2.7 million euros worth of arms and
ammunition exported toSaudi Arabia since 2015, Montenegro is the latest
country to join a 1.2 billion-euro Central and Eastern European arms pipeline supplying weapons to countries sponsoring Syria’s opposition.
Saudi
Arabia is by far the largest buyer, with more than 829 million euros in
export licenses from eight European countries including Montenegro.
Other buyers since the escalation of the Middle Eastern conflict in 2012
include the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Jordan.
But arms
experts believe equipment such as that sold by MDI is not destined for
Saudi Arabia and is likely being diverted to Syria and, to a lesser
extent, Libya or Yemen.
Pieter Wezeman of the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute, a leading non-governmental
organisation that tracks arms exports, said: “When Saudi buys, in
particular, old munition(s) in Central Europe, I would assume it is not
for their own forces.”
Zoran Damjanovic, director of MDI, told
reporters for Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, and the
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, OCCRP, that his firm
had the necessary paperwork in place to export to Saudi Arabia. When
asked if he was worried that the weapons could have been diverted to
Syria, he responded: “It’s no concern of mine what happened later.”
Countries
exporting weapons are supposed to verify the shipment will not end up
in the hands of terrorists or others who violate human rights, but
ministries interviewed by BIRN and OCCRP appear to have made little
effort to complete such checks. Some experts call the shipments illegal because of the well-documented diversions in this pipeline.
Emptying Stockpiles
Formally
state-owned MDI is Montenegro’s biggest arms exporter, and it is mainly
involved in the sale of the country’s military stockpiles to
international buyers.
The trade database of the UN reveals that
between August 2015 and May 2016, Saudi Arabia received 32 tonnes of
anti-tank weapons and 250 tonnes of ammunition from Montenegro,
including mortar shells and bullets for anti-aircraft guns.
The
shipment from MDI included 10,000 Yugoslav-era Zolja anti-tank rocket
launchers, 56 mortars and nearly 500,000 mortar shells and other
ammunition.
The identical equipment was bought at the Montenegrin
Ministry of Defense’s yearly surplus auctions. Of the € 4.5 million
worth of equipment auctioned off in 2015, MDI bought € 3.2 million.
When
BIRN and OCCRP asked what checks were made to verify the weapons
exported to Saudi Arabia would not be diverted to conflicts in Syria or
Yemen, the Ministry of Economy, which grants arms export licences,
responded that the Foreign Ministry checks the validity of end-user
certificates “on the basis of the available diplomatic and consular
ties.” Exports are also approved by the Interior Ministry.
The
response said export licences are either approved or denied based on
verification and due diligence checks, but, when asked, they did not
provide details of any assessments that were carried out in the 2015
exports. The Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Damjanovic,
director of MDI, told BIRN and OCCRP that Western countries, mainly
NATO and European Union members, had exported weapons worth billions to
Saudi Arabia in the past six months. He said Montenegrin exports are a
“statistical error” compared to other countries.
Montenegro’s
Ministry of the Economy also confirmed that Nikolas, a second arms based
in the coastal town of Herceg Novi, obtained one license to export
2,200 mortar shells to Saudi Arabia.
Nikolas did not respond to requests for a comment
Questionable Privatisation
In
February of 2015, MDI was sold to a consortium of two controversial
companies –Israel’s ATL Atlantic Technology and Serbia’s CPR Impex.
ATL
Atlantic Technology is linked to Serge Muller, a Belgian-Israeli
businessman with a history of dealing arms and diamonds in Liberia.
Muller
was arrested on a Belgium-issued Interpol Red Notice just hours after
leaving the MDI privatisation ceremony in March 2015, in the Montenegrin
capital Podgorica. He has since been extradited to Antwerp on charges
of drug smuggling and money laundering. He denies the charges.
The privatisation prompted MANS, a non-governmental organisation based in Podgorica, to file a criminal complaint in May 2015 asking for an investigation into suspected violations of laws and procedures.
As
for CPR Impex, one of the region’s most important arms brokers, it has
been a major player in sales to Saudi Arabia. It is owned by Serbian
businessman Petar Crnogorac.
Crnogorac was arrested in July 2014
by Serbian police on charges of abuse of office over a series of
military tenders for surplus military equipment his company participated
in between 2011 and 2013. He was accused of receiving inside
information about competing bids.
The charges were subsequently
dropped, but he has since been investigated by the UN for allegedly
violating arms sanctions by trading with Libya.
In April of last
year, the UN’s sanctions panel for Libya began probing whether
Tehnoremont, a CPR Impex subsidiary, had sold weapons to Islamist
fighters in Libya via MDI. The deal was allegedly brokered in December
2014 while the company was still under the auspices of the Montenegrin
government. Crnogorac told BIRN that while discussions had been held on
exports to Libya, no deal had been signed and as a result there had been
no reason to ask permission from the UN.
In March 2016, the UN
panel reported that the Montenegrin and Serbian government had received
no request for exports to Libya and appears to have closed the case.
Crnogorac
declined to comment on MDI’s recent exports from Montenegro to Saudi
Arabia, although BIRN and OCCRP have learned that his Belgrade firm, CPR
Impex, is involved in a number of deals that include selling
Serbian-made arms to Saudi Arabia.
Montenegro: Stricter Rules
In June this year, Montenegro, a candidate for EU membership, adopted a new law
to tighten restrictions on the arms trade in response to demands from
Brussels. As a result, delivery certificates - documents that are
supposed to prove equipment has reached its end user – will be subject
to mandatory checks.
The law was passed, the government said, to prevent weapons ending up in conflict zones around the world.
It seems the new legislation will soon be put to the test by Saudi Arabia’s hunger for cheap Central and Eastern European arms.
This investigation is produced as a part of Paper Trail to Better Governance project.
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