Eighteen people suspected of being part of an international drug trafficking network were arrested last week in France, Spain and Dubai, the French finance ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
On May 5, while 22 tons of sugar mixed with cocaine from Colombia were seized in France, ten suspects were arrested in France.
According to Le Monde, which revealed the information with Le Parisien, “one eighth of the total cargo was contaminated, in proportions varying from 3% to 15%”.
At the same time, seven Colombian nationals, suspected of being “chemists” responsible for extracting cocaine from sugar, were also arrested in Spain, while a man, already convicted in 2018 for his participation in an organized gang scam in VAT on CO2 quotas, was in Dubai.
These arrests were carried out within the framework of investigations carried out for several months by the Judicial Investigation Services of Finance (SEJF), the Anti-Narcotics Office (Ofast), and the PJ of Nice.
An investigation opened in 2021 in Nice
It all started in June 2021 with an investigation opened by the Nice public prosecutor’s office into suspicions of alleged partial unemployment fraud in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the press release.
Justice had been alerted by the Ministry of Labor to “a company that did not appear to have any activity” which had nevertheless received compensation of 124,000 euros, specifies Bercy.
Seized by the Nice prosecutor’s office, the SEJF revealed “that this fraud was the act of a criminal organization (…) in the context of tobacco and drug smuggling activities, in particular from the Arab Emirates States and Colombia».
Faced with the scale of the fraud and its international ramifications, the investigations were resumed last February by the National Court in charge of the fight against organized crime (Junalco) and three investigating judges from the Paris court appointed to continue the investigation.
Investigators discovered that this criminal organization was behind “the import of 12 tonnes of tobacco seized by the Belgian authorities in August 2021, 600 kilos of cocaine seized in September 2021 in the port of Cartagena by the Colombian authorities as well as the laundering of several million euros,” the statement said.