Drug traffickers used Noboa Trading Co. containers to transport cocaine, investigation reveals

At least three containers sent by Noboa Trading Co., the family business of President Daniel Noboa, transported large amounts of cocaine from Ecuador to the Balkans. According to research published Thursday, by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

An investigation shows that that drug traffickers used Noboa Trading Company banana containers to ship cocaine to the Balkans.

Details of the shipments were contained in encrypted chats in which alleged drug traffickers from the Balkans boasted of having the exclusive rights to traffic cocaine disguised in banana export containers of the Noboa Trading Co.

The chats are part of a confidential document from the Croatian prosecutor’s office that registered two people using Sky ECC, an encrypted messaging platform that has been used repeatedly by Balkan mafias. The two people were identified by anonymous PIN numbers and in one of their conversations they boasted that “no one but them” had permission to ship cocaine in Noboa Trading containers, the report details. OCCRP released an excerpt from that document.

Serbian investigative news outlet KRIK identified Nikola Đorđević, an alleged organized crime figure, as one of the characters behind one of those PINs. Serbian police are currently looking for Đorđević for a cocaine trafficking case not related to Noboa Trading’s shipments, the report says.

The publication also mentions that it is unclear how Đorđević and his associates would have accessed the containers of Noboa’s family business, but that in their chats they referred to three specific shipments of cocaine and transmitted details of the date, name of the ship and container number of the Ecuadorian banana exporter.

The reporters, the investigation recounts, compared the data of the chats with real shipments of bananas from Noboa Trading. “For example, they mentioned a shipment of 430 kilos of cocaine hidden in container MEDU9747725, which they said left Ecuador on January 25, 2021. By consulting shipment records and export data, reporters confirmed that Noboa Trading did indeed ship that same container on that date,” OCCRP explains.

The three shipments, which were carrying 535 kilos of cocaine that would have had a market value of at least 26 million euros at the time, were sent from the Port of Guayaquil on the Liberian-flagged container ship MSC Mirella. These shipments were made for three months, between the end of 2020 and early 2022, before being transferred to other ships. OCCRP made an animated map with the route of one of those shipments.

A document from the Croatian prosecutor’s office indicates that the last of them, which contained 60 kilos of cocaine, was seized by Croatian authorities in early March 2022, after being unloaded in Ploče, a port on the Adriatic Sea.

Noboa Trading is Ecuador’s fourth-largest exporter of bananas. Between 2014 and 2024, the company and its associated brands, such as Bonita, exported $190 million of the fruit to Croatia, one of its key markets, OCCRP details.

Reporters from KRIK, OCCRP and the Investigative Journalism Bureau participated in this investigation, requested a comment from Noboa Trading Co. and President Noboa’s office, but received no response.

OCCRP said if found no evidence connecting owners of the company to drug traffickers.
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Source: OCCRP