Arms dealer in Libya sanctions denies links with Blackwater’s Erik Prince, UAE associates

Arms dealer James Fenech has denied to MaltaToday that he has supplied “military assets” to the UAE-registered companies Opus Capital Asset, and Lancaster 6 (DMCC), after police launched an investigation into the use of RHIBs by personnel with links to the Emirati government and its efforts to arm Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar. 

Fenech said he “categorically denied” having supplied two RHIBs that are suspected of having been used by private military contractors in Libya in support of Haftar’s Libyan National Army, which is backed by the UAE. 

Fenech was charged last week of breaching EU sanctions on Libya, through the illegal export of the RHIBs back in June 2019. 

The charges also come late in the day, with news of the RHIBs having already made the Maltese news last year. 

The arms dealer has insisted the RHIBs were contracted to a UAE client solely for evacuation purposes. 

“Both RHIBs were contracted on a purely ‘bare boat’ charter basis: no Maltese crew was used. They left Malta carrying all the necessary permits both from Customs as well as from the police immigration unit. Although the agreement with was for 90 days, the situation in Libya escalated rapidly and within a few days of their delivery the client decided to use the RHIBs to evacuate the personnel immediately,” Fenech told MaltaToday. 

The evacuation was of 21 of the client’s personnel – mostly holding British, French, American, Australian and South African passports – who then flew out of Malta. Fenech said this was done “in full accordance with all applicable Maltese laws and procedures.” 

Fenech says he engaged a top legal firm, unnamed, to perform due diligence on his UAE client. 

One of Fenech’s arms companies, PBM Limited, has a branding agreement with the Blackwater trademark by the private military contractor Erik Prince. Yesterday Fenech denied having ever worked with Erik Prince “in any capacity… we had absolutely no dealings with him, his companies or any involvement with any of his other endeavours.” 

Prince’s Blackwater supplied aircraft to the CIA, and deployed private military contractors in Iraq. He became a globally infamous figure after his corporate soldiers were involved in a 2007 Baghdad firefight that killed 17 civilians. In 2013, after a $42 million settlement with the Justice Department, Blackwater was broken up, with its pieces renamed and Prince largely excluded from their operations. 

In early 2014, Prince and Citic Group, China’s largest state-owned investment firm, founded Frontier Services Group, a publicly traded logistics and aviation company based in Hong Kong. 

One of Prince’s associates then was Christiaan Durrant, a former Australian special forces pilot, tasked to run a defunct aviation arm for FSG under Prince’s direction. 

In 2016, Durrant registered the Maltese company Lancaster 6 Limited. He spent some time living in Malta. Its owner is the Dubai-registered L6 Group Holding. Lancaster 6’s company secretary is Amanda Perry, who has also been associated with Opus Capital Asset – described as a geopolitical national security firm – which according to US public records spent $60,000 lobbying the White House “on geopolitical issues in Africa.” 

Fenech has denied having worked “either directly or indirectly with Christiaan Durrant, either in Malta or anywhere else in the world”. 

Lancaster 6 describes itself as “a group of passionate and highly capable individuals who believe in prosperity breeding peace” that consults governments on oil and gas, and other security issues, amongst other aims.

News reports from 2018 say the company’s activities included the acquisition of transport aircraft from Ukraine to be armed with American-made guns. The operation was similar to that employed by Prince at FSG, who had attempted to build a private air force using crop-duster planes with heavy weaponry, to run counterinsurgency campaigns largely from the air. Durrant was fired from FSG in 2015 after an internal review on Prince’s aviation activities inside the company.