Week in Review: Breaking Rules, Busting Sanctions

The Sanctions Buster

Illustration: BIRN

Slobodan Tesic is reputedly one of the biggest arms traders in the Balkans. He is also one of the most controversial in the region, having been the subject of UN sanctions over violations of embargoes on weapons exports to Liberia for the best part of a decade.

From 2017, he has found himself and his related companies directly sanctioned by the US Treasury department. All of this does not seem to have stopped his weapons exporting activities. Yet, in a bizarre twist, a BIRN investigation uncovers that companies thought to be linked to Tesic have been exporting weapons to six US companies - including one that works with the Pentagon.

Read more: Bangs for Bucks: Serbian Arms Dealer Makes Mockery of US Sanctions - Again (August 8, 2022)

Creative Rule Breaking

The building of the former Dajti hotel. Photo: Nensi Bogdani/BIRN

Back in 2010, the Albanian Central Bank bought a dilapidated yet historic state-owned hotel in the Albanian capital Tirana. The Central Bank paid some 30.4 million euros for the Dajti Hotel, designed by Italian architects and built between 1939 and 1942, in what some in Albanian saw as a thinly veiled attempt to finance the government's budget deficit via the Central Bank.

Yet the Central Bank buying a hotel was not the strangest part of the story. Our investigation reveals some very strange twists and turns about how contracts for renovating the hotel passed from one company to another under a veil of secrecy.

Read more: Albania's Central Bank Breaks Rules in Renovation of Iconic Hotel (August 9, 2022)

Finding a Voice

An opposition supporter carries an old Macedonian flag outside the Parliament during the...