Sierra Leone: The cocaine trail

**Ed Butler** (0:01)
Hello there, welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Ed Butler, and today in the first of two programmes, we're on the trail of a wanted drugs kingpin from the Netherlands, the extraordinary rise in mystery surrounding Jos Leijdekkers.

**Lucia Byrd** (0:18)
Leijdekkers is a significant trafficker in the global cocaine business. He has been convicted of several cocaine trafficking charges in both Netherlands and Belgium.

**Ed Butler** (0:29)
He's been filmed and repeatedly identified in the capital of a West African country, Sierra Leone. But what's the government doing about it?

**Sophie van Leeuwen** (0:38)
He visits the president's daughter. They also like to go out together. So the authorities said, we don't know him, but local people tell us we know he's connected to the president.

**Ed Butler** (0:50)
Tracking one of Europe's top drugs fugitives. That's all to come on Business Daily from the BBC.
May 1st, this year, and the head of the Spanish Coast Guard's anti-drug operation, Lieutenant Colonel Oscar Ramacha, receives a tip-off. A cargo boat, the Arconian, is travelling across the Atlantic. It's about to transfer a large shipment of cocaine, he's been told, to smaller speedboats off the southern coast of Spain.

**Oscar Ramacha** (1:33)
We knew six fast boats were to introduce this cocaine through the coast of Spain, Huelva and Cali.

**Ed Butler** (1:44)
So the cocaine was heading for the Spanish market, you think?

**Oscar Ramacha** (1:48)
Some part is for the Spanish market, but other part is spread through the European countries and also other countries from Asia or whatever.

**Ed Butler** (2:00)
Customs officers board the ship.
What they found was no ordinary haul, some 30 tons of cocaine packaged in plain view along a corridor running from bow to stern. It was the biggest seaborne seizure of cocaine ever made. 22 crew members from Europe, Africa and Suriname were arrested. But the suspected mastermind behind the shipment, a Dutch drug dealer called Jos or Jos Leijdekkers, who was based in Sierra Leone, well, he remained at large. How do you know this has come from Jos Leijdekkers?

**Oscar Ramacha** (2:43)
One is the origin of the ship who start his trip from Sierra Leone. He control all the cocaine who goes from Sierra Leone to other parts of the world. And we have also more information that he is receiving the cocaine from Suriname. He is putting in big warehouses.
He is the number one for us.

**Ed Butler** (3:07)
Would you say he is the most important figure in the West African trade coming to Europe?

**Oscar Ramacha** (3:13)
Of course. He is the boss in Sierra Leone, but he is also as an octopus.
He has his fingers in other parts of the world.

**Ed Butler** (3:26)
This massive cocaine seizure from West Africa may only be the tip of the iceberg.
Lucia Byrd runs the Observatory of Illicit Economies in West Africa at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. She says the region has become central for meeting Europe's hungry appetite for cocaine.

**Lucia Byrd** (3:47)
We have many indicators from seizures to increasing local consumption and decreasing retail prices that really point to a surge in the volume of cocaine that is being moved through West Africa towards Europe.
And West Africa is not just a transit zone. It's really a logistics hub where cocaine is imported, it's amalgamated or cut up and then redistributed through the best channels to Europe. And trafficking cocaine through West Africa has allowed trafficking networks to sidestep some of the increased scrutiny that trade foes from Latin America were experiencing coming into Europe.

**Ed Butler** (4:33)
Are you worried about state capture here? That literally we have governments in West Africa that are beyond the reach of international law enforcement?

**Lucia Byrd** (4:46)
The word narco state has been used far too freely and without a clear definition.
What we can evidence is that the world's cocaine trade is bigger than it's ever been, and that a very significant portion of that is moving through West Africa. Now, with more cocaine comes more money, and some of that money is being used to purchase protection.

**Ed Butler** (5:15)
The Spanish seizure has certainly added to the global focus on Jos Leijdekkers. Just 35 years old, he's already one of Europe's most wanted drug fugitives.

**Giel Timermans** (5:26)
Jos Leijdekkers grew up in the south of the Netherlands, near a city called Breda, located right between the ports of Rotterdam, Antwerp and also Vlissingen, famous or infamous for its cocaine trafficking. And I think that's undoubtedly played a part in how Jos ended up in the life of crime.

**Ed Butler** (5:46)
This is Giel Timermans. He's a Dutch journalist who's pieced together what's known about the beginnings of the Netherlands Mr Big.