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An offshore company with an account at a Bulgarian bank pays $ 31 million to another offshore company with an account at the state-owned Development Bank of Bulgaria (BDB). The first offshore company is owned by a person involved in arms trafficking to the Islamic State, and the other is owned by a well-known Bulgarian arms dealer, Boyan Petrakiev’s partner, “Barona”.
This was announced by the investigative website Bivol, citing data from FinCen Files, top-secret reports of suspicious financial transactions compiled by the US Financial Crimes Network. In the US Department of the Treasury. Bulgarian media are found among the partners of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) working to uncover the matter.
The transfer in question was made on November 1, 2016. The company with an account at Piraeus Bank is called Heptagon Global Trading and is registered in Dubai. Send $ 31 million to the account of the Seychelles company Osiris Global Trade, which is in the Bulgarian Development Bank. As the transfer is in dollars, it went through the correspondent bank The Bank of New York Mellon. He reported the dubious FinCen translation a month and a half later, in early 2017.
The detailed report on the deal notes that Heptagon Global Trading is registered in Dubai and has a website which, however, does not provide information about the owner. Osiris Global Trade, registered in Seychelles, is believed to be an empty company. No owner details found.
Heptagon Global Trading is owned by the American arms dealer Helmut G. Mertens. It had a branch in the United States, which closed in September 2017, writes Bivol.
Mertens has an interesting biography. He was the son of the German SS Gerhard Mertens, who in 1943 participated in the action of the Nazi commandos of Otto Skorzeny, which freed Benito Mussolini from captivity. After the war, Mertens’ father was recruited into the CIA with Otto Skorzeny, and the two founded the arms trading company Merex AG, which was used to secretly supply German weapons with the blessing of the German authorities. Chile’s former intelligence chief, Manuel Contreras, states in his memoirs that Mertens supplied arms and helicopters to the Pinochet regime.
The fact is that in Bulgaria there is no legal restriction to open accounts of foreign companies registered in offshore destinations. But in any case, a company with such a business, operating with tens of millions of dollars and with an owner involved in arms trafficking, must be seriously investigated by both the bank and the Bulgarian services.
Osiris Global Trade, which received $ 31 million from Mertens, has an account with the Bulgarian Development Bank and is owned by Alexander Lyubomirov Dimitrov.
Until the end of 2019, Osiris Global Trade Limited is the owner of the Bulgarian company Oro Investments. Alexander Dimitrov is mentioned in the statement of the actual owners of this company.
Alexander Dimitrov himself is also the owner of the Algans company, which has a license to trade in weapons. Algans specializes in purchasing outdated batches of Soviet-style weapons and ammunition and placing them on the international market in Asia and Africa. This business is thriving alongside the Pentagon’s program to arm Syrian rebels.
Bulgaria is one of the major arms suppliers under the United States Department of Defense Special Operations Command (SOCOM) program, as evidenced by the Killer Strike investigation, which has received several international investigative journalism awards.
But in June 2015, one of the grenades delivered by Algans exploded at the firing range in Anevo, rented by the company. The explosion killed American instructor Francis Norvillo from Texas, a father of two, Bivol recalls.
Following in the footsteps of the incident, the US website Buzzfeed revealed that Algans is a partner in US company Purple Shovel, which received a US $ 26.7 million US government procurement for supplying weapons to Syria.
But the investigation also reveals that Dimitrov has a relationship with Boyan Petrakiev – “Baron”, one of the leading figures of organized crime in our country. Before starting the arms business, Dimitrov was the Baron’s partner in the company “EIB Metal,” which buys scrap metal, writes the research website.
Following publication, OFFNews staff received an opinion from the successor bank to Piraeus. This is what it says:
In connection with a publication on the bivol.bg website of September 23, 2020 entitled “THE FINCEN FILE: THE BDB STATE SERVES ACCOUNTS RELATED TO BANDITISM AND WEAPONS FOR ISLAMIC COUNTRY” The Postbank account does not correspond to the truth, the company in question has never been a Postbank customer and has never had an account with it.
In view of the fact that today’s post undermines Postbank’s prestige and reputation, we expect your media to publish a rebuttal. Otherwise, we will be forced to claim our rights in court.
