How an alleged associate of the Burkinabè cigarette magnate tried to bribe a Malian official

A secret recording obtained by OCCRP shows how Safy Mokoko Sow, a well-connected middleman claiming to represent Burkinabe tobacco magnate Apollinaire Compaoré, offered money to the head of Mali’s national tobacco company to smuggle contraband cigarettes.

Stormy day in August 2017. The wife of a powerful former Congolese army general visits the head of Mali’s national tobacco company. She is there to “unblock” some business problems of one of the richest men in West Africa, as she put it.

Safy Mokoko Sow, a self-proclaimed intermediary operating across West Africa who claims to have ties to the family of former president Blaise Compaoré in Burkina Faso, says she arranged the meeting through a mutual contact. She is there to convince Issouf Traoré, identified by OCCRP as the boss of the company and an influential figure in the Malian tobacco industry, to prevent Malian customs from seizing cigarettes from Apollinaire Compaoré, a major distributor of international brands. like Marlboro and American Legend.

A few months earlier, hundreds of millions of its cigarettes had been blocked by customs in the country’s northern deserts, where warlords and jihadists vie for control of lucrative smuggling routes to North Africa and Africa. Europe. Compaoré was looking for a way to get his goods across, according to Mokoko Sow, and he thought Traoré could be the solution to his problems. After all, she said, Traoré was the head of the state tobacco monopoly and customs seizures were “a state affair”.

The exchange was documented in a secret 90-minute recording of the meeting, during which Mokoko Sow sought to emphasize his credentials as an intermediary for Compaoré, and even offered a bribe. (Reporters authenticated the recording with a U.S. computer forensics expert, who confirmed it was not altered or falsified).

Although Traore did not accept Mokoko Sow’s offer, experts say the meeting is typical of backroom deals that have seen cigarette smuggling thrive despite two decades of global efforts to crack down on the illicit tobacco trade.

Compaoré’s setbacks with customs mark the beginning of a turnaround in Mali. In June 2018, almost a year after the recorded meeting, another shipment of his cigarettes was seized by Malian customs, leading to a public controversy. And in 2019, Compaoré was named in a United Nations report on the illicit tobacco trade as a figure who worked with regional smugglers.

But in 2017, he was used to being able to easily move his products across Mali. Mokoko Sow said he was eager to find a possible way to prevent his cigarettes from being seized. One possibility, she suggested, was that the tycoon would pay Traoré up to 100 million CFA francs (about $180,000) to help him.

“ [Compaoré] is in a hurry ,” she said; “ He said he was willing to pay .” But Traoré did not respond directly to the payment offer, downplaying his influence in the matter. “ I’m just an industrialist and trader,” he said. “So it’s not entirely fair to say that I have the keys to all of this .” 

Mokoko Sow pleaded her case. It wasn’t the first time she "  unblocked  " Compaoré’s business problems, she told him.

Two former executives of Compaoré’s companies confirmed that Mokoko Sow had worked for the businessman, with one claiming to have seen her in his company’s offices and with Compaoré in Burkina Faso. They requested anonymity out of fear for their safety. Two other West African tobacco industry sources, one of whom worked in Mali for a major international brand, said they knew at the time that Mokoko Sow had gone to Traoré to offer a substantial bribe in Compaoré’s name. They also requested anonymity due to the terms of a nondisclosure agreement with the company.

Contacted by OCCRP, Compaoré and Mokoko Sow declined to comment. Traoré told reporters that his position at the state tobacco company meant he could not comment on the contents of the tape either.

According to Benoît Gomis, a researcher, lecturer and expert on illicit trade at the University of Bath in the United States, the exchange illustrates how distributors of tobacco companies like Compaoré sometimes work with – and seek to corrupt – those responsible. of State.

“ Cigarette smuggling is often described as dominated by terrorist and organized crime groups. But, very often, the main enablers are Big Tobacco and their distributors who deceive or work hand in hand with governments ,” Gomis said.

“If I have to pay,…”

Cigarette smugglers smuggle their products through countries with weak borders and institutions to avoid taxes, often easing their way by paying off public officials along the way. These payments represent only a tiny fraction of what they can save in customs duties. Sometimes millions of dollars per container.

Compaoré’s cigarettes have long crossed the lawless deserts of Mali, Niger and Libya, areas under the control of armed groups and Islamist militants, where customs barely function. Smuggling routes in this region – known as the Sahel – pass through areas controlled by armed groups and insurgents, who take a cut in exchange for protecting and guiding convoys. The illegal tobacco trade in the region, worth an estimated between 600 and 800 million US dollars (between 361 and more than 482 billion CFA francs) per year, helps finance these groups. Which makes cracking down on cigarette smuggling in the Sahel a priority for government agencies as far away as the United States and Europe.

Traoré told Mokoko Sow that Malian officials had become concerned about so many cigarettes being transported into the region, leading to the seizures.

“  What was bothering customs was that [the cigarettes] were crossing places where there are, in fact, no Malian customs  ,” he told her.

Pressing on the point, Traoré noted that customs officials were increasingly seizing illicit shipments of American Legend cigarettes – distributed by Compaoré – in towns near Mali’s northern border. The problem had grown so big that he estimated that “ 50% of the market in Gao and Timbuktu is made up of these contraband cigarettes ”.

Only a few months earlier, the head of Malian customs had written to his Burkinabè counterpart to complain about two incidents in 2016 and 2017, during which hundreds of millions of illicit American Legend cigarettes were seized in Mali from Markoye in Burkina Faso.

Customs officials discovered that the cigarettes were missing papers and were not declared for transit. Furthermore, they do not carry authentication and traceability markings, and are not authorized to be sold in Mali – all signs that they were being smuggled to more lucrative markets.

Mokoko Sow ignored the suggestion that the cigarettes were smuggled. Compaoré often routed his cigarettes through Mali to a long-time customer in Algeria, she said, emphasizing "  he doesn’t sell them [in Mali]  ."

As she pressed her interlocutor, he began to ask her pointed questions about why Compaoré is transporting American Legend cigarettes through Mali in the first place, if they are made in Greece and destined for Algeria .

Mokoko Sow could not give a clear answer. Instead, she pivoted, emphasizing her track record of solving her clients’ problems. It wasn’t the first time she “unblocked” Compaoré’s business problems, she told him. “  I am known throughout Africa, but discreetly, and I have been doing my thing forever  ,” she said, citing an arrangement she claimed to have negotiated in Togo in 2016.

“  In Lomé, there was a blockage because the new customs director wanted…, as is normal…, that some people want to have their thing… ” said Mokoko Sow, referring to Togo’s coastal capital . “ [Compaoré] has been doing this for 20 years. I have visited Lomé several times; we settled it with friends .”

Box : Mokoko Sow’s many demands 

During her meeting with Traoré, Mokoko Sow claimed to have first met Compaoré in the 1990s, through the then president of Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaoré (who has no family ties to Apollinaire). A relative of the former president confirmed that she was known to his family.

A former high-level Burkinabe security minister under Blaise Compaoré, who knows both Apollinaire Compaoré and the presidential family, confided that Mokoko Sow remains well connected in Ouagadougou today: "She has connections everywhere," he said. he declared.

In the recording, Mokoko Sow indicated that she had already resolved a multitude of commercial “blockages” for Apollinaire Compaoré.

In one of the cases she described, Compaoré’s telecommunications company was seeking a license to begin operating in Mali. This stalled after a misunderstanding between Compaoré and his business partner, and the publication of a report by Mali’s auditor general highlighting " violations of existing laws " in the way the contract was won.

Mokoko Sow said she had intervened to smooth Compaoré’s path, both in his initial efforts to obtain the broadband license and to organize the entry into the country of telecommunications equipment stopped by customs. Malian. “  I helped unlock all that  ,” she said.

Indeed, four months after registration, Compaoré’s company began operating in Mali after a five-year delay. Two former managers of Compaoré businesses and a tobacco manager confirmed the story of Mokoko Sow having helped him.

“ It was [Mokoko Sow] who opened the doors of Apollinaire [Compaoré] in Mali ,” the legal advisor of a tobacco multinational told OCCRP.

One of Compaoré’s former employees for more than a decade described how he "  gave money...and everything  " in his efforts to obtain the license in Mali.

According to this person, Mokoko Sow had intervened with Malian President Ibrahim Boubakar Keita (who died in January 2022) on Compaoré’s behalf as he applied for the license.

OCCRP confirmed that seven American Legend containers shipped to Compaoré’s SOBUREX company docked at the port of Lomé in October 2016, around the time described by Mokoko Sow. Customs records show the cigarettes were held for several months before being loaded onto trucks bound for Burkina Faso’s capital.

A former director of Compaoré’s tobacco company, who was familiar with operations in Mali and Togo, confirmed that the tycoon had "  a lot of problems in 2016  " with Togolese customs. Journalists could not confirm whether Mokoko Sow paid for these containers to be released.

According to information from Togolese customs at OCCRP, the shipments were seized because they did not comply with regulations on the sale of tobacco products and their transit through the country. The customs authority confirmed that the cigarettes were subsequently released, without explaining why. But she added: “  Nothing can justify an attempted bribe  .”

Karelia Tobacco Company, which makes American Legend, said it stopped working with Compaore several years ago and declined to comment further.

When none of Mokoko Sow’s tactics made any headway, she repeated Compaoré’s offer to pay to ensure her cigarettes were no longer seized.

“ He said, ’Listen…, if they tell me… if I have to pay…. If I have to go to Mali… If I have to pay 100 million a year for them to leave me alone and for the cigarettes to pass – that’s not a problem,’ ” Mokoko Sow said of Compaoré.

Traoré again ignored the offer, changing the subject rather than responding directly to his suggestion.

Nearly an hour later, she seemed to understand that he wouldn’t help her. She promised to discuss the issues raised during the meeting with Compaoré. “  I’ve seen customs, I’ve seen you, you have all the information you need  ,” she said.

Box: coordinated campaign 

When OCCRP and its partners first reported that Compaoré had funneled billions of cigarettes through Burkina Faso to Mali, financing militants and Islamists, the tycoon denounced the report. An apparently coordinated media campaign falsely assumed that the journalists were in the pay of his Burkinabè business rival, Idrissa Nassa, CEO of the Coris group.

Compaoré told French newspaper Le Monde that OCCRP’s findings were "  false and malicious allegations  " and that his "  companies have never engaged and will never engage in smuggling activities, that they have not never worked and will never work, directly or indirectly, with armed persons or terrorist groups .”

ADIT investigators estimated that SOBUREX ordered shipments of a billion cigarettes – enough to fill ten 40-foot shipping containers – every four to five months. These were then transported through Togo and Burkina Faso and quickly re-exported via the north by truck to other countries, notably Mali.

Each shipment brought in between 7 and 18 million euros in profit for Compaoré, according to ADIT analysis. The tycoon’s cigarettes also likely funded activists as they moved through the region, the report concluded.

“ The very large number of cigarettes sent by SOBUREX to northern Mali suggests that they have a final destination for markets in North Africa and Europe, financing in their path all the terrorist groups present in the region ” , analyze the investigators.

ADIT was not alone in these conclusions. A series of court cases and a UN National Security Council report revealed that SOBUREX had worked with notorious smugglers in the Sahel, including an infamous Nigerien drug lord, Chérif Cocaine, linked to an offshoot of Al-Qaeda.

In the months before Mokoko Sow approached Traoré in 2017, Burkina Faso’s parliament linked the illicit tobacco trade to brutal terrorist attacks in Ivory Coast and Ouagadougou that killed dozens of civilians, claiming that the smugglers sponsored the attacks in revenge for the seizure of their cargoes. OCCRP then linked Compaoré to the trafficking described by parliament.

Although Compaoré’s affairs had not yet been publicly linked to terrorist financing at the time of Mokoko Sow’s meeting with Traoré, she repeatedly raised the issue unprompted, insisting that Compaoré was not financing not the jihadists.

“ He told me, … it’s been 30 years and we haven’t talked about terrorism or jihadism. I have the same customers, I have the same people, and so I don’t understand why people are now worried about the tobacco trade and terrorism ,” she said.

Traoré responded that he was under pressure to explain how activists were financed.

“  Everyone knows today that it is the trafficking of cigarettes, drugs and human beings that finances terrorism in Mali  ,” he declared. “  It’s not me who says that. Everybody knows it  ".

A survey carried out by OCCRP

David Wilson