How an Obscure MAGA-Linked Firm Lined up $1 Billion in Balkan Energy Contracts |
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
On a graffitied Sarajevo backstreet, a path leads past an overgrown patch of garden to a white door. Beyond is the registered office of a company that is on the brink of winning contracts worth more than $1 billion.
AAFS Infrastructure and Energy is close to securing a concession to build and operate a pipeline across the Balkans to allow fossil gas shipped from the United States to replace supplies that come from Russia. “This could be the most important infrastructure project ever in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” says one of the country’s top officials, who, like others, asks to remain anonymous to discuss sensitive negotiations.
The company has no record of even attempting anything close to this scale. What it does have is personal connections to Donald Trump.
One of AAFS’s representatives is a Washington lawyer who has acted for the Trumps in political cases. The other is the brother of the president’s former national security adviser. Both were part of a campaign that is close to Trump’s heart: the effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
A Guardian investigation, based on interviews with current and former Bosnian and US officials, leaked documents and corporate paperwork, has examined the obscure company that has been thrust into the global struggle for energy supremacy. It offers a glimpse of how international relations are changing under a presidency that blurs the line between government policy and the enrichment of the ruling family and those around it.
“There is a logic, in our current world, of having administration-connected people involved in big economic projects or investments,” says a former senior US official in the region. “It is unsavory but so much of my country’s politics is unsavory these days.”
In the former Yugoslavia, the stakes are higher than just who might get rich. US intervention could undermine the peace deal it brokered in 1995 to end a war that killed 100,000, many of them Muslim Bosniak civilians massacred by Serb paramilitaries. A generation on, Bosnia’s ethnic leaders are still manuevering for advantage.
US officials have left Bosnia’s leaders in no doubt about what the Trump administration wants: the go-ahead for AAFS’s pipeline.
When the Guardian knocks at AAFS’s Sarajevo address, a woman calls down from an upstairs window that its local representative will be back soon. Amer Bekan arrives a few minutes later. A large middle-aged man, he says AAFS’s office will be moving to a big building with 100 employees.
Bekan’s online CV calls him an “investor and entrepreneur with extensive experience.” He has tried politics as well. After coming last with 116 votes in a 2016 run for mayor in central Sarajevo, another campaign in 2020 led to him being accused of abusing the elections for personal gain, an allegation he denied.
No one........