BIRN: Frenki’s boys - Sons of Serbian war criminal tied to blacklisted arms dealer

At the height of his power in the 1990s, Franko ‘Frenki’ Simatovic’s Ray-Ban aviators were his signature, a symbol of the ‘mystery man’ image he cultivated as commander of Serbia’s elite Special Operations Unit. Serbian media frequently referenced his “unofficial” biography, said BIRN.

Slobodan Tesic, one of the most powerful arms merchants in the Balkans, has a similar aversion to publicity; blacklisted by the United States, he is rarely photographed and hardly ever communicates with the media, it said.

That was as much as the two men had in common, or so it was thought.

In fact, according to the findings of a BIRN investigation, for more than a decade while their father was being tried for war crimes committed by Serbian forces in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Simatovic’s sons were doing business with associates and companies linked to Tesic.

Since 2008, one or both of the sons – 41-year-old Mario Simatovic and 48-year-old Igor Simatovic – has worked closely with Nemanja Kuntic, a representative of Cyprus-registered Moonstorm Enterprises Ltd, which was slapped with sanctions by the US in 2019 “for being owned or controlled by, or having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, Tesic,” reported BIRN.

Igor Simatovic has collaborated with Kuntic – who is not on the US blacklist – in at least six different enterprises, including a number registered in well-known tax havens, it said.

BIRN can also reveal that Mario Simatovic, Kuntic and a number of associates are co-owners of a company called East Iron, which in 2018 took over a 10 million-euro debt owed by Libya to another Cyprus-based company, Charso Limited, blacklisted by the US for its alleged ties to Tesic. Charso had been delivering arms to Libya.

In March, Forbes Serbia reported that Serbia had struck a deal to pay off the debt taken over by East Iron and in doing so cut its own debt to Libya for oil exports in the 1980s. According to court documents obtained by BIRN, the agreement between East Iron and the Libyan state is currently before the Serbian Business Court, with Serbia’s ministries of finance and foreign affairs at odds over whether it needs to be regulated at the state level.

How the Simatovic brothers ended up in business with Tesic’s associates is not completely clear, but two different sources in the arms industry, one current, one former, said they were likely brought together by the late Serbian-American mobster Bosko ‘Yugo’ Radonjic, a leader of the Irish-American ‘Westies’ crime gang in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, one of the founders of ‘Group America,’ the alleged drug-trafficking criminal organisation and a collaborator with John Gotti of the Italian Gambino family, BIRN reported.

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