The freighter Blume, representing Greece, was already on the Coast Guard’s black list last fall, having been spotted off the coast of the Canary Islands last week with 4.5 tons of cocaine. Corps officers passed on information about the ship in question to European drug enforcement agencies, including the Maritime Operations and Analysis Center (MAOC).

Six EU member states are involved, including Spain, and the country’s security forces (National Police and Civil Guard) raid the ship last Tuesday. “As a result of a joint Spanish operation coordinated by the MAOC, 4,500 kg of cocaine were seized,” the Center for Analysis and Maritime Operations said in a statement.

Unemployed shipowner

According to fully confirmed information “K”The Greek owner of “Blum” was the object of interest of Coast Guard officers even before the confiscation of drugs. The company, based on Philos Street in Piraeus, acts as the ship’s manager, with the 22-year-old Greek as its sole partner. He himself, due to her young age, has neither a criminal past nor a research interest. However, the same does not apply to his close relative, who is not excluded that in the next twenty-four hours the officers of the coast guard or the prosecutor’s office of Piraeus will call him to give explanations. In the case, moreover, information from “K” states that, based on the publications on the seizure of 4.5 tons of cocaine, the Piraeus prosecutor’s office had already requested a preliminary investigation since Saturday.

A close relative of a 22-year-old man was charged in 2013 with possession and trafficking of 368 kilograms of raw cannabis. An investigation into the case was conducted in April 2013 by the SDOE Narcotics Prosecutor’s Office, where drugs were found in a workshop warehouse in Aspropyrgos. 368 kg of raw cannabis were placed in 334 paper bags and hidden in a special cache in the base of a refrigerated truck. The amount of confiscated drugs is estimated at 3.6 million euros. According to the materials of the criminal case, the car belonged to the supposedly “invisible” manager of the dry cargo ship.

A relative of the man believed to be the ship’s steward has… a very interesting background for the authorities and is expected to be called to testify in the coming days.

Since January last year, Bloom has been flying the flag of Togo, and the last change of ownership is dated January 18, 2022. The truck sailed to Brazil, where it apparently loaded 200 tons of coffee bound for Riga. , Latvia.

Smuggling

information “K” reported that it was not the Greek Blum that initially attracted the attention of the Brazilian authorities, but another cargo ship off the coast of the country, on which the deactivation of the automatic identification system (AIS) was discovered. When they checked its movement, they discovered that a second freighter was also approaching it with AIS disabled due to suspected smuggling in the Atlantic Ocean. So, about a day later, while the truck was sailing near the Canary Islands, Spanish special forces soldiers made a breakthrough, discovering and confiscating 4.5 tons of cocaine.

“Complete ignorance”

Greek officials note that their Spanish counterparts did not inform them of the operation in time and therefore lost the advantage of surprise in the event of checking the Greeks involved in the case. In their confirmation, the well-known criminologist Sakis Kehadzhioglu, after his communication with the ship’s managers, published a statement in which, in particular, he stated that “both the shipowner and the management company of the ship, which turned out to be foreign companies, have absolutely nothing to do and do not know about the loading and the transport of drugs on board, information that, to their surprise, became known to them through the press.