PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, (Reuters) – Brazil’s Forjas Taurus SA, the largest weapons manufacturer in Latin America, sold guns to a known Yemeni arms trafficker who funneled them into his nation’s civil war in violation of international sanctions, according to charges in court documents reviewed by Reuters.
Federal prosecutors in southern Brazil charged two former executives of Forjas Taurus in May with shipping 8,000 handguns in 2013 to Fares Mohammed Hassan Mana’a, an arms smuggler active around the Horn of Africa for over a decade according to the United Nations.
The handguns were allegedly shipped by Taurus to Djibouti and redirected to Yemen by Mana’a, according to court documents.
Alexandre Wunderlich, a lawyer for the two former Taurus export executives, Eduardo Pezzuol and Leonardo Sperry, said the accusations in the sealed indictment “do not reflect the facts of the matter.”
Yemen has been consumed since early last year by a brutal civil war killing thousands of people as Iran-backed Houthi rebels challenge a Saudi-allied government.
Mana’a, who served from 2011 to 2014 as governor of Sa’dah, a Houthi stronghold, could not be reached for comment.
A Brazilian court issued a public summons for Mana’a in May as part of a case citing him, Sperry and Pezzuol as defendants.
Taurus declined to answer detailed questions on the weapons case due to legal confidentiality but said it was “helping the courts to clarify the facts.”
Following the Reuters report, the company confirmed in a securities filing on Monday that two of its former executives had been charged for an alleged 2013 arms shipment destined for Yemen.
After learning about suspicions surrounding the Yemeni arms dealer, Taurus said it halted another shipment he negotiated.
The case, currently sealed by a judge in the southern city of Porto Alegre, near Taurus’ headquarters, may draw legal scrutiny to the company, a major supplier of firearms to Brazil’s police and military and one of the top five makers of handguns in the U.S. market, where it sells nearly three-quarters of its production.
Brazil is the world’s fourth-largest exporter of small arms.
Prosecutors say the two former Taurus executives were negotiating another shipment of 11,000 guns with Mana’a last year when police uncovered the plot and raided the company’s offices in November.
Prosecutors have not brought charges against Taurus but said evidence seized in the raid included dozens of emails showing it knew of U.N. sanctions against trading arms with Mana’a and Yemen but sought ways to skirt them.
“Taurus clearly made use of a notorious international arms trafficker to triangulate its merchandise to other countries, especially Yemen,” the documents said.
“There is no way Taurus and its employees can claim to be unfamiliar with acts attributed to Mana’a, since Leonardo Sperry testified it is standard for Taurus to do an internet search on people they invite to Brazil,” they said.
Sperry and Pezzuol gave testimony to federal police in October 2015 as the investigation got underway. The executives left Taurus late last year, according to their LinkedIn résumés.
“All of the acts covered in the case were carried out entirely within the company and within legal limits,” their lawyer said in an email. He declined to answer other questions, citing the confidentiality of the case.
