Radar: Profiting from deals to sell Krusik arms

According to the weekly, the Krupnik company sold 12,000 artillery shells at 1,339 Dollars a shell and paid the state-owned Krusik munitions plant 451 Dollars less, keeping the difference.

It said that Krupnik’s deals with Krusik continue on the deals set up by former Internal Affairs Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic’s late father Branko and his partner Slobodan Tesic who kept their dealings with the munitions maker hidden. Krupnik continue that practice even after a whistleblower from Krusik made the shady dealings public.

Radar said it had access to contract showing that Krusik lost some 5.4 million Dollars in its dealings with Krupnik in 2021 and 2022 along because the private company kept the difference in price for itself. Krupnik continued its dealings with Krusik in deals with th US Heptagon Global Trading. Krupnik made 8 deliveries of a total of 12,000 155 mm M107 artillery shells to the US company with the Saudi Defense Ministry specified as the end user in the contracts. Krupnik signed a commission-based contract with Krusik to pay 878 Dollars a shell which were then sold to Heptagon Global Trading for 1,330 Dollars each. This deal earned Krupnik 5.4 million Dollars.

Krupnik has similar deals with other Serbian state-owned military industry companies. The State Auditing Institution (DRI) report for 2019 said that Krupnik did not hand Krusik any of the paperwork on their dealings that it was obliged to do.
Krupnik’s first contract with Krusik was in 2014 to sell 81 mm mortar shells. That deal was worth 530,100 Dollars. That developed into contract to sell 120 mm mortar shells in Bulgaria a year later. Krupnik was also part of 69 million Dollar deal, one of the biggest single deals the defense industry saw in the past 20 years, to sell 20,000 Grad 2000 missiles.