A notorious drug kingpin set up shell companies in the British Virgin Islands and Dubai to employ alleged cartel underlings Sarajevo-native Edin “Tito” Gacanin, documents show

Sarajevo-native Edin “Tito” Gacanin registered the companies in the secrecy havens as he continued to ship cocaine globally, despite being convicted by Dutch courts for narcotics trafficking.

An international cartel leader accused of deluging countries in Europe and beyond with cocaine and amphetamines set up a company in Dubai to employ key members of his organization, including three men accused of drug trafficking, money laundering and attempting to overthrow the Bosnian state, records leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reveal.

Edin “Tito” Gacanin, a Netherlands passport holder and native of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, has been convicted of trafficking huge quantities of narcotics to Europe from Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned him in 2023, calling him “the leader of the Tito and Dino Cartel” — reportedly part of a super cartel of notorious criminal organizations that include the Kinahan organized crime group of Ireland, the Dutch MocSarajevo-native Edin “Tito” Gacaninro Maffia and Italy’s Camorra — and a transnational money launderer.

Gacanin lives freely in the emirate of Dubai, one of seven sheikhdoms, or emirates, that make up the United Arab Emirates, a confederation with a thriving trade in financial secrecy, shell companies and opaque free zones. The UAE is now also home to several international drug traffickers, many considered high-value targets by police and several under sanctions.

Born in 1982, Gacanin grew up in the southern Dutch city of Breda after his family fled the Bosnian war of the early 1990s. He later made numerous visits to Peru, where four crime families in the town of Trujillo were allegedly producing cocaine and preparing shipments to Europe for him while liaising with key locally based Gacanin lieutenants originally from the Balkans, several of whom he had known since childhood.

By 2014, he had moved again, this time to the UAE, where the following year he set up a company in the city of Dubai called Edin DMCC, which, according to leaked documents, only a few months later changed its name to Edin Group DMCC, apparently to mirror the name of a parent company, Edin Group Ltd., set up in the British Virgin Islands around the same time using the agent Overseas Management Company Trust Ltd., also known as OMC.

In garbled English, the company’s business plan says: “Edin Group will administrative [sic] consultancies and studies to public departments and companies as regarding administrative performance analysis, procedural engineering, laying out flow-charts and related documents circulation, internal policy formulation, organizational restructuring, strategic plans development, innovating work procedures, designing balanced scorecards.”

The leaked records include Gacanin’s Dutch passport and his 2014 Dubai residency card, which states that he is the managing director of ENG International, another Dubai company. Gacanin signed a letter in February 2016 to Dubai authorities as “General Director” of ENG International, stating that the company had no objection to Gacanin opening, managing and operating a branch in Dubai. Judging by the documents, no authorities in Dubai or the British Virgin Islands raised objections to Gacanin establishing companies, despite the fact that he was a convicted drug dealer.