Recap of the first article in our series: On November 21, 2024, Sudanese fighters filmed what they said was a shipment of mortar shells bound for the Rapid Support Forces, the militia that is fighting against the Sudanese Army in the ongoing civil war. These weapons, manufactured in Bulgaria, were shipped to Sudan despite the European Union embargo on sending weapons to this war-torn country. We’ve been investigating how this happened.
Read moreEuropean weapons in Sudan (1/5): Bulgarian mortar shells in Darfur’s desert
How did European bombs get to a Sudanese battlefield, despite an EU embargo on shipping weapons there? After identifying the Bulgarian company that manufactured the mortar shells, Dunarit, the FRANCE 24 Observers team tried to trace the history of these weapons. We questioned the Interministerial Commission on Export Control, the Bulgarian authority that oversees arms exportations.
Initially, the commission did not disclose where the mortar bombs shown in the video filmed on November 21, 2024 in Sudan had been exported. All they said was that they “had not issued an export permit to Sudan”.
“The export permit was issued to the government of a country that is not subject to UN Security Council sanctions,” they added. “The relevant Bulgarian authorities were informed of the delivery of the goods and the original delivery certificate for the final destination of these products was provided.”
But the FRANCE 24 Observers team was able to obtain a copy of this delivery certificate from a source who asked to remain anonymous. The document, issued on August 16, 2020 by the “United Arab Emirates G.H.Q. [General Headquarters] Armed Forces”, provides a lot of information about the transaction. We learned that the “final destination" or end user of the Bulgarian mortar bombs was supposed to be the armed forces of the UAE.
This document shows just how large the shipment of mortar bombs was: 15,000 bombs measuring 81 mm (like those seen in the videos from November 21, 2024 filmed in Sudan) but also 2,780 bombs measuring 60 mm, 30,000 measuring 82 mm and 11,464 bombs measuring 120 mm, a much more powerful calibre.
The arms were delivered to the Emirati Army in two shipments, in January and February 2020. Moreover, the document lists two companies, as well as the General Headquarters of the Army: a Bulgarian “supplier”, ARM-BG Ltd., and an Emirati “importer”, International Golden Group PJSC. The manufacturer, Dunarit, isn’t mentioned.
Our team was able to corroborate this information with a second document, which we obtained from a separate source with access to information supplied by the Emirati Army on the arms sale. This subsequent document, called an end-user certificate, is a guarantee to the manufacturer and regulators in the country where the armaments came from that the final user of the weapons has been verified.
This certificate also allows the end user to make a number of binding commitments, including whether or not they are permitted to re-export weapons.
In this case, the certificate was issued by the Emirati Army, who is also listed as the end user. It features the same contract number, supplier and importer as the first one.
“It is a reasonable assumption that these two documents are part of the same transaction,” says Nicholas Marsh, a researcher specialised in arms exports at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo.
'The end user did not let us know that there would be any kind of re-exportation. I don’t know what happened afterwards.'
On the end-user certificate, dated October 2019, the Emirati Army agrees that it will use the weapons for its own needs and that they “will never be transferred, re-exported, lent, rented out or handed to third parties or countries without written consent of the authorised bodies of Bulgaria…”
Our team asked the Bulgarian Interministerial Commission on Export Control if they had agreed that the weapons be re-exported to Sudan or elsewhere. They reiterated that they “had not issued a permit to export the weapons to Sudan.”
The CEO of Dunarit, Petar Petrov, went into further detail during a phone call with our team:
On the documents, you see the destination country, but also the company [Editor’s note: International Golden Group], it’s a public company. We don’t have restrictions on exports to the United Arab Emirates and that is what our commission looked into. By law, if the end user decides to re-export the weapons, they need to let all parties involved in the transaction know — the manufacturer, the commission, everyone. In this case, they didn’t do that. I don’t know what happened afterwards.
The end user certificate also refers to a much larger quantity of bombs than the first document: 105,000 mortar bombs versus a little less than 60,000 listed in the first document.
Expert Nicholas Marsh says that there is nothing unusual about this. “That's to make it easier for them if they have other deliveries. That way, they don't have to go back and ask for a new licence,” he said. “We can't be sure that the difference between the number on the delivery verification certificate and the number on the end-user certificate [Editor’s note: a little over 45,000 mortar bombs] was effectively delivered.”
A contract worth around 50 million euros
Marsh estimated that the total price for these 105,000 mortar bombs would be around 50 million euros.
This kind of shipment would be consistent with a large non-state armed group. This is a serious amount of ammunition for this type of group. However, for a national government involved in a war, it would be pretty small.
Our team was able to run Marsh’s estimates by the Omega Research Foundation, a network of researchers specialising in identifying and exposing human rights abuses committed across the world by people using police, security, and military equipment. They agreed that this number was verifiable.
An arms sale of 50 million euros would be a big deal for Bulgaria. According to data collected by the European network against arms trade, Bulgarian exports to the United Arab Emirates was valued at between 10 and 30 million euros annually from 2015 to 2020.
In 2019, the year of the transaction, this figure leapt to 83 million euros. In this year, the sale of 105,000 mortar bombs likely represented more than half of the value of Bulgarian exports to the UAE.
ARM-BG, the Bulgarian intermediary
The Bulgarian Interministerial Commission on Export Control maintained in numerous exchanges with our team that Bulgaria respects all agreements on export control and has a responsible national policy.
However, the profiles of the parties involved in this sale raise serious questions. There is very little information available about ARM-BG, the Bulgarian exporter, though this company does indeed have an official licence to export and import arms.
According to information available on the specialist website Orbis, the company only has four employees and seems to have made most of its profits during the two years when the Dunarit arms sale was taking place. Its revenue rose to more than 78 million US dollars in 2019, then 106 million in 2020, before dropping sharply to 6 million dollars in 2021, the year when ARM-BG went into severe deficit. It seems to have lost nearly 3.5 million dollars.
We spoke to Arsen Nazaria, a manager at ARM-BG, who insisted that the transaction his company undertook was legal:
The application for the export permit issuance for the UAE End user was submitted by ARM-BG Ltd. to the Interministerial Commission for Export Control [...] and contained all the data and documentation mandated by Bulgarian and European legislation and UN regulations.
Speaking with our team on the phone, he added: “We are a brokerage company. We don’t export or import ourselves, nor do we deal with the goods.” However, in the documents provided by the Emiratis to the Bulgarian authorities, ARM-BG is listed as the “exporter” or “supplier”.
We contacted ARM-BG a second time, but they declined to comment further. The Interministerial Commission for Export Control said that they had “no proof of Arm BG Ltd.’s involvement in shipments to illegitimate final users or in illegal plans to re-export.”
International Golden Group, the Emirati buyer linked to diverting weapons
The other company listed on the documents is International Golden Group. It is listed as the “importer” of these weapons into the United Arab Emirates. Helen Close, a researcher specialising in armaments at Omega Research Foundation, was able to gather information about the company through its activities in the weapons market in the UAE.
International Golden Group was created in 2002 and we think that it was a private or semi-private company, but it definitely had links to the [Emirati] government. In 2017, it stated that it was a leading supplier to the UAE Armed Forces and the Ministry of the Interior.
There are no sanctions or embargoes on the sale of European weapons to the United Arab Emirates. But International Golden Group isn’t exactly a run-of-the-mill company: aside from supplying the Emirati Army, it is known for illegally diverting weapons to war zones, said several specialists who spoke to the FRANCE 24 Observers team.
Tony Fortin at the Lyon-based Observatory for Armament, an organisation that specialises in monitoring arms sales and companies in the sector, says:
International Golden Group has a very bad reputation, it is well known, including among manufacturers in the sector. It is a company that has a reputation for functioning as sort of a state within the Emirate state, and is used to manage arms movements without regard for transparency.
Indications of illicit activity appeared in reports by the UN Panel of Experts on Libya, a country which has been subject to a total arms embargo by the United Nations Security Council since 2011.
Every year, the panel completes a general report on the situation in Libya and tries to identify the countries, companies, and individuals who violate this embargo.
In its report from 2013, International Golden Group was identified as a key party in the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Albanian-made weapons' cartridges to Benghazi, in eastern Libya.
“International Golden Group represented the armed forces of the United Arab Emirates in the deal,” the report states.
International Golden Group is identified in several other reports by the panel. Reports from 2016, 2022 and 2023 all mention that the group has acted in violation of the UN embargo on exporting weapons to Libya.
The report from 2022 mentions Serbian-made 120 mm mortar bombs. One of these bombs was used to booby-trap a civilian home in Tripoli in November 2020 when General Khalifa Haftar, the military leader of eastern Libya, led a massive incursion on the Tripoli region, which was then under the control of the UN-recognised Libyan government. Haftar had support in this offensive from the UAE as well as the Russian paramilitary Wagner group.
In the same report, the panel goes into further detail on the 2013 case: “Although the end user was falsely declared as the United Arab Emirates [Editor’s note: on the document provided by International Golden Group], the ammunition was shipped by air directly to Benghazi, Libya" from the Albanese territory.
The flight that carried the weapons was chartered by an intermediary and while the flight plan showed the United Arab Emirates as the final destination, it was changed at the last minute to Libya.
The 2016 report details how the panel demanded Bulgaria trace how rifles manufactured in their country ended up in Libya.
“The Bulgarian authorities informed the Panel that the International Golden Group originally imported the weapons and that the end user was the UAE Armed Forces,” the Panel says.
The Bulgarian authorities have known since at least 2016 that weapons sold to International Golden Group, supposedly on behalf of the armed forces of the United Arab Emirates, might be illegally re-exported — that’s a full three years before the UAE sent the Bulgarian authorities the first documents on the purchase of mortar bombs manufactured by Dunarit.
"What should happen [in this kind of situation] is as soon as Bulgaria knows about this, they should share the information with other European governments,” Marsh said.
And then they should stop using IGG. They should also be very careful about exporting anything to the United Arab Emirates. But that isn't happening nearly as much as it should.
Our team asked the Bulgarian Interministerial Commission for Export Control if, when they authorised the export of Dunarit bombs to the UAE in 2019, they were aware of the many cases documented by the UN Panel of Experts on Libya and its findings that International Golden Group was illegally diverting weapons. They did not respond to our questions.
Our team was not able to trace the final leg of the Bulgarian weapons’ journey to the battlefield in Sudan — if, indeed, they were exported by International Golden Group to zones in eastern Libya under the control of General Haftar. We put these questions to both the Bulgarian Interministerial Commission on Export Control and International Golden Group. Neither responded to our questions.
But that wasn’t the end of the road. We were able to learn more about the weapons transfer by tracing the path of one of the men who was part of the weapons' convoy that brought the Bulgarian armaments to Sudan. His Colombian passport can be seen in the videos from November 21, 2024.
This is the second article of a five-part investigation.
Julia Rougié also contributed to this article.
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