An operative behind a Turkish company red-flagged by the UN for violating sanctions on Libya came out of the shadows after the European Union sanctioned the firm in September 2020.
The company was first identified in a UN Panel of Experts report in December 2019 as a weapons supplier to Libyan factions.
According to trade registry records filed on December 29, 2020, Nuri Ali Karabilgin, a 48-year-old customs consultant in Turkey’s central province of Konya, listed himself as the general manager of the brokerage firm BKNC.
On paper, the company is still wholly owned by Nuri Karabiljin, the company’s caretaker and a relative of Nuri Ali, and these changes have been made to retain “Nuri Ali” the full legal authority to represent the company, in all types of business deals as a general manager.
Misrata port authorities discovered a shipment of guns on January 7, 2019 during a search of a container offloaded from the MV Esperanza a week earlier. The 20,000 Ekol-Voltran blank firing pistols, convertible to real guns, were purchased by BKNC.
Although BKNC was established on April 28, 2017 in Konya as a customs brokerage consultancy and food and weapons trading firm, it quickly expanded its international reach, purchasing pistols and sending them to Libya. Its activity in trading highly restricted goods such as weapons suggests it was protected by the authorities in Turkey.
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