What are the links of Behgjet Pacolli to the narcophant from Latin America?

Jack Davies

Enrique Rais is manager of the company Reis Group International - What? C.LC., which figures in American justice documents as an international investigation of his connections to organised criminal groups, ghost companies, cartels and corrupt politicians. Periscop's research found that in one of the company's documents, Foreign Minister Behgjet Pacolli figures as one of the company's officers. The following article brings other details that have raised doubts about Pacolli's cooperation with Rays...

Since his first days, Behgjet Pacolli's career in public view has been associated with scandals. It now turns out that the foreign minister's name has appeared in American courts as a business partner of a man suspected of international cocaine trafficking, and since last year it's on the Red List of Interpol and one of the <x0 most wanted” from El Salvador.

Business company in question: Rais Group International The NC, LLC was listed by U.S. law enforcement forces that worked as a <x0-company for the production of pipas per drink” founded by a man named Enrice Rais to facilitate the use of suspected aircraft used to smuggle drugs from South America to the United States.

The documents issued for public by the tribunal are linked to a request issued in 2016 by the Florida Sheriff's office to seize four planes under the Florida Contra-confiscat Act. The Sheriff's office had removed her request two months later, after Rais had agreed to pay a deal of 20,000 dollars.

Although there is no implications in the legal documents that Pacolli was involved in this illegal activity, his listing in official documents such as “menager” in the Rais Group International [which Pacolli strongly denied] raises questions about the foreign minister's role in the organisation, as well as about his relations with Rais. The Salvatore businessman was appointed to court documents as “Objective with the Priories” for the American Law Agency against Drugs. [ Footnote] DEA, like “subject of the international investigation into its links to [...] organised criminal groups, ghost companies, cartels and corrupt politicians. ”

Pacolli's relationship comes to an even clearer focus, saying that during the beginning of this year, Reiss found himself in The Red List of Interpol, widely known as an international warrant. Trusted that Reis has last year gone to Switzerland, whose citizenship he has, in trying to avoid accusations of corrupting his country's high-level judiciary. El Salvador's National Police are now seeking his return to face justice.

In a private e-mail correspondence, Reis has described Pacolli as “Sook and his associate.” Pacolli company “Mabetexi” reportedly sold Reis a luxury apartment in Switzerland at a much lower price than it cost in 2010, and in 2011 it was reported that Pacolli, in his role as deputy prime minister, nominated Rais for a diplomatic post in Honduras, which would come with diplomatic immunity.

The Beginning of a Beautiful Society

To get to the gene of their relationship, we have to go back in time for about a decade, in 2009. Kosovo had declared independence only a year earlier and was hungry for international recognition. Pacolli, then a private businessman, gave himself the task of crossing the globe on a private plane to meet important international leaders as well Libyan Colonel Gadaffi  And the foreign minister of the Maldives, Ahmed Shahed. Its stated goal was to increase the number of countries' recognitions for Kosovo's independence.

In view of these trips, Pacolli arrives in El Salvador's capital, San Salvador, in April 2009, where he helped Reis get his doors to the corridors of power of this tropical nation.

We don't know if Rays and Pacolli met each other before this meeting, but according to Periscop's research, this is the first documented meeting between the two. They were joined by senior politicians.

Given that Kosovo had declared independence only a year earlier and was still trying to achieve international recognition of its sovereignty, Reiss' ties hardly make him an ideal ally in legitimising the country.

In 2008, just a year before Pacolli's meeting with him, Reiss Co-owner in Midas, a garbage dealing business, Jose Luis Merino, “helped a Colombian terrorist organization get weapons;” Court Documents Martin County.

Reiss would join Merinos in September 2011 as part of a Official delegation from Honduras's American country to Kosovo, at the country's first deputy prime minister, Behgjet Pacolli.

According to an article published in 2015 by Salvatore magazine Factum Magazine and on the website for Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Insight on CrimeIn 2010, a year after Pacolli met with Rais, the first-owned Mabetex engineering group sold the second to an apartment at the Swiss Diamond Hotel in Lugano. The article was based on the reported correspondence that it was sent by Reiss' personal email.

It is further claimed that the e-mail shows that not only did Reis buy the apartment at the luxury hotel complex é for a fraction of the price back at Lugano é but he also paid with tranches from a series of international accounts of transactions linked to ways that seemed to have nothing to do with real assets. ”

Facebook magazine and Insight On Crime also reported an e-mail sent by Reiss on February 23rd of a year later to his business associates:

<x0) Pacolli was sworn in yesterday as Kosovo president. That's what I expected, and we've already started the burial company in Tripoli and Libya [like],” wrote it.

It is unknown why Ries was exactly waiting for Pacolli to become president or what was the connection for Tripoli/Lip. Anyway, Pacolli's choice. declared unconstitutional by Constitutional Court Kosovo's only one month later.

Forced to resign, the former president immediately became deputy prime minister with foreign affairs portfolio. At that capacity, later in that year, Time.net reported that he had nominated Rais as an honorary consul of Kosovo in Honduras, on a list of five similar ones proposed for other countries.

Time.net reported at the time that the foreign affairs minister refused to comment on his honourary consultations. Even when this article was published, the minister had also refused to respond. But neither does the Kosovo Agency for Intelligence. AKI, which is responsible for the potential verification of honorary consoles.

However, two out of six names on the Time List have been verified as honorary consoles from Periscope.

Taking the official wall of silence surrounding the nominated for honourary counseles, so far it has not been possible to restore when during 2011 they should have been nominated.

Organised criminal groups, ghost companies, cartels, and corrupt politicians

2011 is also significant for Pacolli-Rais' relationship for another reason, because it's November 17th 2011 when in Corporation documents Pacolli list who was still Kosovo's deputy prime minister as manager at the Reis Group International transport company. The document uses the same malprning of Pacolli's name as “Bedjet” as in the February 23rd email referring to Pacolli's appointment as Kosovo president.

Because of the nature of business registers in North Carolina, where this transport company was registered, it is not possible to make full sure that when Pacolli was first listed as company manager, or if he still remains listed in this position.

In January of the same year, however, Reis Group International launched the launch of Canada Boardier, a small passenger plane from another Reiss operation, JDA LLC. This plane, with the N400 registration number KM, is one of four planes that many law agencies in the United States believe were being used for international narcotics trafficking, and later proven to confiscated in 2016.

Court documents say that one of the other planes, Lights 31a Fixed Wing, multi-motoric aircraft, with N54 registration number HT was also registered to Rais Group International.

In the court's 112-point request, Martin County of Florida, evidence is presented that Reis Group International and other organizations designated at the request were “conominant for the production of liquor pipas” for Rais, which owned “iduid personally and openly” aircraft. According to the request, Reis used American citiesmen “to hide his ownership from US-registered aircraft,” desirable practice by South and Central American drug trafficking organizations because they are less verified in the safety of international airports,” and which is less likely to be confiscated in other countries.

The three main pilot, the copilot and the Reiss mechanic told DEA agents that his planes were mainly outside El Salvador's claim that it was “a drug centre for drug trafficking organisations in Central America” despite Reisi's provision of legal documents that they would be used for high coast Florida flights.

Court documents claim an agent DEA found that N44's main pilot 0 The KM had a “passport covered with seals from Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico, which are countries that mostly cross drug traffickers from Central and South America. ”

Also reportedly, a drug sniffer gave indicators that even in N44 0 KM but also N54 HT had been used for drug transport, with a second sniffer dog confirming these findings, and the agent of DEA noticed that N44's inter 0 The KM was renovated to carry less than half the passenger cargo, which the document says is “consistent with drug smugglers. ”

The request also notes that Rays Group International's air operation chief, Charles Blount, was identified by the DEA by a reliable informant as someone who “had piloted a plane that was used to transport heroin to the US, and who, in advance, had been discovered while piloting a Boeing 727, a plane that standardly carried 189 passengers but that was modified to carry only twelve sosh. ”

In the meantime, the request also says that JDA, LLC “the owner of the pipas for water to drink” for Rais who rented the N44 plane. 0 The KM at the Rais Group International ʹ was identified by DEA intelligence as “subject of at least four drug seizures, one of which resulted in seizures of more than 6.8 kg [15 kg] Pound] cocaine and 4.5 kilos [10Pound] cannabis. ”

Included as part of the document is a photograph believed to be N44's assistant 0 KM, featuring Rais along with the former president of Honduras, Porfirio Lobo Sosa. Sosa's son, Fabio Lobo, has been serving his sentence for 24 years at the U.S. Federal Prison after a court in Manhattan e. Declared guilty In September 2017 for conspiring to smuggle 5 kilos of cocaine into America. During the hearing where Lobo was found guilty, one Former senior member of the drug gang from Honduras Los Cachiros He testified that his organization had bribed Lobo's father, then president, with hundreds of thousands of dollars for “assistance”

T Archived data that Periscop received from Martin County FTP server indicates that over an eight-month period from July 2013 to March 2014, N44 0 KM made at least five flights from Stuart Airport to Florida to El Salvador's Ilopango Airport.

Ilopango, Florida, and Cocaine have a long pedigree like threes. In 1997, Inspector's Department of Justice General released a report examining claims that the CIA and the Nicaraguan contractors [in Periscope: the US-backed rebel group] had jointly operated to smuggle industrial cocaine into the United States during the 1980s. Ilopango Airport was taken from time to time as a place where DEA agents and their informants said drugs came from South America to reach Florida airports.

There is no concrete evidence that the five flights listed in Martin County's data were linked to drug dealing. In any case, they match within the model set by the documents of the court of Martin County, of planes within El Salvador's El Salvador flights, “a known drug centre for central America drug trafficking organisations and a stop along the most violated roads in the international drug trade”.

Amazingly, the only recorded trip to Martin County's data is to a private aircraft area in the Bahamas, which was named by jurisdiction as “primary concern” in one 2014 report From the U.S. State Department because it was thought to be a transit point for drugs headed for the U.S., like a tax paradise for traffickers to hide their criminal wealth.

While the claim of the seizure was established, Pacolli's listed position as the manager of the Rais Group International, and his and documentary relationship with Rais lies in more than a decade, meaning that there are serious questions to become the foreign minister.

What was it or is it his role in the Rais Group International? Was he aware that the registered aircraft of this organization were re-enlisted in a way that is used by international narcotics traffickers? Did he know that individuals under this organization, including Raisin, were linked by US law enforcement authorities to the underworld drug smuggling world? What other business ties does he have with Rais? Has he offered him office in the Kosovo diplomatic service?

In comments via email, Pacolli's cabinet chief, Jetlir Zyberaj denied that the foreign minister was involved in the Rais Group International: “Z. Pacolli has nothing to do with what you're getting involved with, nothing with any of your claims. Mr. Pacolli never served in the capacity of the Director or Manager of Nothing you refer to,” he wrote.

However, he confirmed that during 2011-2012 [years in which corporate registration documents say Pacolli became a business partner with Raisin] that Reis was nominated for the position of honour consul “though clear and correct, that such a proposal was never formal and therefore withdrawn, was revised. ”

Zyberaj concluded by saying “I can add that your claims stem from incorrect information that you may have” and raised the possibility of legal procedures if Periscope published “any information that could damage Mr. Pacolli”

 Jack Davies is an independent journalist who deals mainly with topics about the Western Balkans. This writing was written exclusively for Periscope.