A DUBAI-BASED ‘narco bank’ funding cocaine trafficking into Spain and allegedly headed up by some of the world’s most notorious mafia kingpins has been exposed in an international police operation.
Spain’s Policia Nacional, working with Europol, said on Tuesday it had arrested 21 people and seized or frozen almost €20 million in assets belonging to the underground network.
Europol calls the network the ‘Dubai Bank’ – a clandestine, hawala-style money-transfer system that moves criminal cash across borders without the cash itself ever crossing one, or ever touching the official banking system.
The network is suspected of bankrolling major cocaine shipments into Spain and beyond, then laundering the proceeds back into the legal economy through property, vehicles and shell accounts.
The case began with a cocaine seizure at sea in February 2021, when Policia Nacional officers boarded a vessel off Spain’s northern coast and found almost two tonnes of cocaine on board.
Once the drugs and crew were removed, the vessel was towed to Gijon, a port city on Spain’s northern Asturias coast – however the boat mysteriously sank on the way.
Investigators later discovered a further 1,650kg of cocaine had been hidden aboard, which members of the network are suspected of retrieving by diving down into the sunken wreck under the authorities’ noses.
Tracing the money behind that shipment, police said, gradually led investigators up the chain to the financial network suspected of bankrolling it and laundering the proceeds worldwide.
Despite this success, the key identities of the individuals running the bank had remained a mystery to the public.
But regional Galicia newspaper the Diario de Pontevedra recently reported on five names running the network, including Spain’s and Sweden’s biggest drug traffickers respectively. A mysterious Englishman also features.
One of the five, a Turkish man named Urfi Cetinkaya also known as El Paralitico (the Paralytic), is already dead.
Cetinkaya died in September 2024, according to specialist outlet Narcodiario, which separately reported in April 2025 that he was the owner of the Gijon shipment at the heart of the case.
The only Scandinavian among the four still living is Jonas Sture Falk, the Swedish national dubbed ‘Sweden’s Pablo Escobar’.
Falk was convicted again time in Stockholm in July over a separate 2.3-tonne cocaine haul, and Swedish broadcaster SVT reported he faces further proceedings in Spain once that sentence is served.
Falk was also the subject of one of seven international warrants executed against the network since July, in his case in Sweden, according to reports.
As The Olive Press reported in October 2025, Spain’s Supreme Court had previously quashed a money-laundering conviction against Falk relating to offences from 2007 to 2009 – a ruling unconnected to Tuesday’s case.
One of the other notorious figures alleged to sit on the ‘narco bank board’ is Alejandro Salgado Vega, a Spaniard nicknamed El Tigre (the Tiger), described by Guardia Civil investigators as Spain’s biggest cocaine trafficker.
He remains a fugitive, believed to be sheltering somewhere between Dubai and Qatar.
His right-hand man is reported to be Carlos Humberto Arango, a Colombian known as Burger King, although his real identity has been questioned.
Arango, 43, from Valle del Cauca in western Colombia, was detained at Dubai’s airport on March 29 as he tried to board a flight to Bali, according to Colombian media at the time.
The fifth man, Perikles Daremas, is an Englishman known as Spartan, who was arrested in the United Arab Emirates as part of this operation.
It is the first time, according to Diario de Pontevedra, that Spain has managed to catch a member of the Dubai Bank’s leadership.
Officers seized around €8,000 and $1,400 in cash from him at the time, along with UAE dirhams, mobile phones and luxury watches, the paper reported.
Separate Spanish reporting published Tuesday links both el Tigre and Daremas to an unrelated but long-running corruption scandal centred on Oscar Sanchez, the former economic crimes police chief who was found with €20 million hidden in the walls of his home near Madrid.
This newspaper has followed that case since November 2024, when Sanchez was first accused of stashing millions of euros in cash at his home.
By July, police had raided addresses in Madrid, Barcelona, Malaga, Guadalajara and Tarragona and arrested 14 people, including two serving police officers, with the cash recovered from his walls alone reaching €20 million.
Investigators separately allege Sanchez Gil made more than €30 million helping traffickers smuggle 58 tonnes of cocaine into Spain while running the unit meant to stop them.
Between them, the ‘Dubai bank’ network is accused of amassing a fortune: 48 properties worth more than €14 million, high-end vehicles worth over €1.6 million and 121 bank accounts holding €2.3 million, according to Europol.
Investigators also traced the money to a luxury property in Ibiza, bought, they believe, with drug proceeds.
Diario de Pontevedra put the cash seized across the wider operation at more than €39,000, along with jewellery, designer bags and numerous mobile phones.
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Alberto Morales, the police commissioner leading Udyco, the Policia Nacional’s central drug and organised crime unit, called it ‘a hugely important blow’ against the financing of what he called the ‘number ones’ of drug trafficking.
“We have managed to strike at the financing of the top names in drug trafficking,” Morales said. “For a while, we will be safer.”
He added that the goal was to choke off the money behind the trade rather than simply seize cocaine shipments as they arrived.
Fourteen of the 21 suspects were arrested in Spain during a raid on July 22, according to the Policia Nacional.
The remaining seven were detained abroad, in the UAE, Egypt, the Netherlands and Sweden, part of 19 international arrest warrants Spain has issued against suspects outside the country. Twelve of those warrants remain outstanding.
A sixth man, described only as the network’s suspected principal broker, was also arrested in Spain and ordered held in custody, Europol said.
Also detained in the operation, Diario de Pontevedra reported, was Moncho Vilaboa, a well-known suspected trafficker from the Rias Baixas, a stretch of coastline in Galicia, along with several members of his inner circle; investigators allege his organisation was hired to bring around 3,500kg of cocaine ashore once it arrived on the vessel at the heart of the case.
Twelve of Spain’s international arrest warrants remain unexecuted, and El Tigre remains at large.
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