Cocaine in Noboa Trading containers: 535 kg sent from Ecuador to Croatia
Balkan drug traffickers used containers from President Noboa's family company to smuggle cocaine from Guayaquil. Three shipments confirmed between 2020 and 2021.
President Noboa's company containers linked to cocaine trafficking to the Balkans
Suspected drug traffickers from the Balkans used containers belonging to Noboa Trading Co. TCN S.A.—the family company of Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa—to send cocaine from the port of Guayaquil to Croatia, according to confidential documents from the Croatian prosecutor's office reviewed by noticiasvenevision.com and associated investigative media.
In an encrypted chat from February 2021, two individuals identified only by PIN numbers on the Sky ECC platform boasted of having exclusive rights to introduce cocaine into Noboa Trading's export containers. "No one else but them" had permission to load the drug in those containers, according to the Croatian prosecution document.
Three shipments verified with export records
Reporters from KRIK, OCCRP and the Investigative Journalism Bureau—a Canadian independent journalism organisation—cross-checked the details shared in the encrypted chats against actual shipping records and export data from Noboa Trading.
One of the messages referenced a shipment of 430 kilos of cocaine hidden in container MEDU9747725, supposedly dispatched from Ecuador on 25 January 2021. The export records confirmed that Noboa Trading sent that exact container on the same date.
In total, the three shipments examined carried 535 kilos of cocaine aboard the Liberian-flagged container ship MSC Mirella, between late 2020 and early 2021. The drug was subsequently transferred to other vessels. Its estimated market value amounts to at least 26 million euros.
The last of the shipments, containing 60 kilos of cocaine, was seized by Croatian authorities in early March 2021, after being unloaded in Ploče, a port on the Adriatic Sea, according to the same prosecution document.
Division of labour among criminal groups
Serbian investigative media KRIK identified one of the encrypted chat participants as Nikola Đorđević, a suspected organised crime figure currently sought by Serbian police in an unrelated cocaine trafficking case involving the Noboa Trading shipments.
In Croatia, the unloading operation was supposedly run by a gang led by Petar Ćosić, who faces trial in that country for organising a criminal organisation, aggravated homicide and trafficking hundreds of kilos of cocaine from Ecuador, including the drug found in Noboa's containers. Ćosić did not respond to a questionnaire sent to his lawyer.
The court documents show a clear division of labour: Đorđević's group organised the loading in Ecuador, whilst Ćosić's gang handled the unloading in Croatia.
"There are groups that specialise in the filling at the point of origin, in maritime logistics or in local distribution, and then they sell or trade those capabilities," said Anna Sergi, an organised crime expert and professor of sociology at the University of Bologna, to OCCRP.
Noboa Trading did not respond
Noboa Trading is part of Noboa Corporation, a conglomerate that produces bananas under the Bonita brand and is run by the family of the Ecuadorian president. Neither Noboa Trading Co. nor the president's office responded to requests for comment made by the investigative media.
The documents reveal, according to the journalists, the ease with which export chains of legal goods can be infiltrated by transnational criminal networks. Modular cooperation between groups—each specialised in one stage of the chain—is, according to Sergi, part of a growing trend in cocaine trafficking to Europe.
Source: Google News EC — Crime