![\"investigations\/Hashmat-Ghani.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.occrp.org\/assets\/investigations\/Hashmat-Ghani.jpg\")
<\/p>\nMONITORING (SW) \u2013 An Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting (OCCRP) investigation found that the Afghan president\u2019s brother,\u00a0Hashmat Ghani, owns a significant stake in Southern Development, which operates a mineral processing plant on the outskirts of Kabul.<\/p>\n
Afghanistan\u2019s crags and valleys hold at least a trillion dollars\u2019 worth of minerals, first mapped by Soviet geologists in the 1970s. Local warlords and foreign powers have plundered these deposits ever since.<\/p>\n
The Taliban and other armed groups have\u00a0battled both the central government and each other\u00a0for control of the mines, using them to fund their insurgencies. Even former U.S. President Donald Trump coveted Afghanistan\u2019s gold, lithium, uranium, and other mineral riches. In 2017, Trump was\u00a0persuaded to keep troops\u00a0in the country by its president, Ashraf Ghani, who dangled the prospect of mining contracts for American companies.<\/p>\n
American troops are still in Afghanistan \u2014 at least until September \u2014 and Ghani has delivered. In late 2019, SOS International (SOSi), a Virginia-based company with links to the U.S. military and intelligence apparati, obtained exclusive access to various mines across Afghanistan. As part of the deal, Ghani\u2019s family got a little something on the side.<\/p>\n
Ghani granted a SOSi subsidiary, Southern Development, also known as SODEVCO, rights to buy artisan ally mined ore. An OCCRP investigation found that the president\u2019s brother,\u00a0Hashmat Ghani, owns a significant stake in Southern Development, which operates a mineral processing plant on the outskirts of Kabul.<\/p>\n
The concession presents both a conflict for both the Afghan leader and the U.S. government.<\/p>\n
\u201cEntering into this relationship in Afghanistan, a country with a widespread reputation for corruption, and obtaining unique benefits from it, is suspect,\u201d said Jessica Tillipman, assistant dean of the Government Procurement Law Program at George Washington University. \u201cIf there was a color redder than red, that\u2019s what color this red flag would be.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2011, American Special Forces operators\u00a0introduced an eastern Kunar paramilitary commander, Noor Mohammed, and his deputy, known as Farhad, to a small Pentagon business development office called the Task Force for Stability and Business Operations. The Task Force, which operated in Iraq and Afghanistan, aimed to create jobs for locals in key industries like mining as part of a broader counterinsurgency strategy. In theory, good jobs would stop Afghans from joining the militants.<\/p>\n
\u201cTheir mission, to create small-scale, sustainable mining operations for the Afghans, was a solid fit to our FID [Foreign Internal Defense] mission,\u201d said Heinz Dinter, a former Special Forces officer.<\/p>\n
The commandos asked the Task Force to help the two local warlords, who were illegally dealing in chromite, a valuable anti-corrosion additive used in stainless steel and aircraft paint. Afghan chromite is prized for its exceptional purity. With a crusher provided by the Pentagon, Mohammed and Farhad began to process their ore at Combat Outpost Penich, a small NATO base in eastern Kunar.<\/p>\n
The whole project was illegal in Afghanistan, where public officials and leaders of government-aligned militias such as Mohammed and Farhad are\u00a0forbidden by law to hold mineral rights. Afghan law also prohibits buying ore from unlicensed mines, where it is extracted by villagers \u2014\u00a0often children\u00a0\u2014 with no concern for safety or environmental damage.<\/p>\n
Moreover, the mines are largely controlled by the very militants the U.S. and Afghanistan have been fighting for decades.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no conceivable way extraction or export could be done without the collusion of insurgent groups,\u201d said Jim Wasserstrom, an anti-corruption expert who has worked for several U.S. agencies in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
After a couple of years of operation, the Kunar scheme was\u00a0exposed by an anti-corruption NGO, Integrity Watch Afghanistan, and the crushing operation was shut down by then-President Hamid Karzai\u2019s administration in 2013.<\/p>\n
But for the Task Force\u2019s natural resources group, getting the project off the ground by giving Mohammed and Farhad $3.8 million in mineral-crushing equipment was a big deal, and indicated such schemes had huge potential. The Pentagon office had published several geological surveys and provided assistance to the Afghan Ministry of Mines, but no other independent mining projects had come so close to full fruition.<\/p>\n
A Special Forces major, Ryan Hartwig, touted the benefits of the Kunar project in a\u00a02013 Naval Postgraduate School thesis, calling it a \u201cmajor success\u201d and a model for future Special Forces-facilitated business development.<\/p>\n
Task Force officials interviewed by Hartwig said Special Forces intervention in the mining sector was key to saving the country, and downplayed complex health, safety, and political issues surrounding small-scale mining. They also criticized Afghanistan\u2019s prohibition of unlicensed mining, saying such clampdowns were simply getting in their way.<\/p>\n
Hartwig\u2019s thesis cited Tarek Ghani, whose father was soon to become the Afghan president. Then a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, the younger Ghani had been given a pre-publication review copy. He endorsed the critique of Afghan mineral law and suggested that involving private companies in artisanal mining would force the government to accept the practice.<\/p>\n
Task Force officials remained bullish on strategic mining long after the project was closed down; some even saw it as a possible form of Taliban rehabilitation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only way to realistically economically reintegrate the Taliban back into Afghanistan\u2019s economy is with mining,\u201d Emily Scott King, the former director of the Task Force\u2019s natural resource group, said in 2019 at a\u00a0special operations policy forum\u00a0in Washington, D.C. \u201cIt can work within the hierarchy that the Taliban is used to, with commanders running small processing facilities or becoming the brokers for small miners.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scott King and her colleagues never gave up on Afghan chromite. Although the Task Force\u2019s Kunar project had been shuttered, it would later reopen under new, private management: Southern Development \u2014 the subsidiary of Virginia\u2019s SOSi in which President Ghani\u2019s brother had invested.<\/p>\n
Wasserstrom, the anti-corruption expert, said: \u201cIntelligence and Special Forces do what it takes to achieve their mission. Their military mission may have ended, but these guys may have thought they could make a ton of money and advance our national security at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Cowboy Consultants<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n As a U.S. government insider, Scott King was a key player in privatizing the Pentagon\u2019s defunct chromite project.<\/p>\n A geology major, she joined the Task Force as a mobile banking project consultant in Iraq not long after finishing her undergraduate degree at Bowdoin College in Maine. When the Task Force mission expanded into Afghanistan in 2010, Scott King was put in charge of setting up and running its natural resources group.<\/p>\n One former Task Force official described the natural resources group as unusually secretive.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were putting the majority of their work into cooperative ventures they had with the Special Forces world,\u201d said the official, who asked not to be identified for safety reasons.<\/p>\n In 2011, much of the Task Force\u2019s senior leadership quit after Congress transferred the authority for its operations in Iraq to the civilian United States Agency for International Development. Scott King didn\u2019t get along with the office\u2019s new leadership, repeatedly clashing with them over safety and the organization\u2019s mission.<\/p>\n After numerous internal blow-ups, she left the government in 2013. By then, she had made exploitation of conflict minerals her niche. A self-proclaimed \u201cmining futurist,\u201d she co-founded a Florida-based private company, Global Venture Consulting, with her husband, Army Special Forces reservist Mark King. The couple had first met in Afghanistan, where he was a security contractor for Task Force geologists. Neither Emily Scott King nor Mark King responded to detailed questions sent by email.<\/p>\n Global Venture offers mining and mineral exploration services geared to \u201cemerging and frontier markets\u201d that require a Special Forces-style edge. Advertising its experience in executing special operations missions, Global Venture\u2019s website is replete with photos of its founders working in harsh environments. One page shows the smiling couple in the desert, fronting a herd of camels. Scott King wears a brown jacket and white headscarf; King cradles an assault rifle.<\/p>\n In the private sector, cowboy outfits like Global Venture found themselves in demand. Before long,\u00a0Global Venture\u00a0was\u00a0working for Southern Development. Scott King brought the Kunar project playbook with her and in 2018 hired Bob Wilson, a former Special Forces commander who had helped start the initial Kunar chromite crushing operation that had been shut down a few years earlier. Wilson did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n \u201cThose [Task Force] chromite projects grew into a $4 million investment from an American company to build a chromite processing facility outside of Kabul,\u201d Scott King boasted at the 2019 Special Forces conference. \u201cNone of that would be the case if it weren\u2019t for the support and the vision of the SoF [Special Forces] community.\u201d<\/p>\n Friends in High Places<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n SOSi, the parent company of Southern Development, was the perfect firm to revive the Task Force project.<\/p>\n Founded in New York by Sosi Setian, a single mother who emigrated from Bulgaria as a teenager and trained as a linguist, SOSi was initially a translation and interpreting service.<\/p>\n In 2004, it moved its headquarters to Reston, Virginia, close to its clients at the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon. Around the same time, Setian passed control of the company to her son, Julian, who prioritized connections with the military and intelligence agencies. Over the next decade and a half, the company added new lines of military support services as its relationship with the government grew along with the War on Terror.<\/p>\n In Afghanistan, the company offers a variety of services, including provision of cultural advisers, intelligence analysis, and producing communications for Resolute Support, the U.S.-led NATO mission.<\/p>\n SOSi\u2019s transition to a military contracting powerhouse came through its connections to the office of retired Army General David Petraeus, the former CIA director and a major backer of the Task Force for Stability and Business Operations while serving as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n Petraeus\u2019s translator and close confidante, Sadi Othman, was a SOSi employee, while his top deputy in Iraq, Lieutenant General Frank Helmick, was later hired to run\u00a0SOSi\u2019s logistics portfolio.<\/p>\n Petraeus wasn\u2019t the only senior government official with SOSi ties. Bush administration Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq invasion, and other U.S. defense officials also joined the SOSi board.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an open secret that SOSi is essentially a front for the DoD,\u201d said a high-ranking Afghan official who has recently dealt with the company, using an acronym for the U.S. Department of Defense. The official asked for his name to be withheld for fear of retribution.<\/p>\n He said that when it came to disseminating its message in Afghanistan, SOSi offered ideal cover for the U.S.<\/p>\n \u201cThe U.S. government cannot directly do business with Afghan companies, so it goes through SOSi, a private entity, to secure deals with all the major Afghan media networks to broadcast Resolute Support and NATO communication material,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Its dealings in Afghanistan have thus far flown under the radar, but SOSi operations in Iraq are now under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department. The company\u00a0allegedly paid an Iraqi firm\u00a0connected to that country\u2019s former prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, in return for exclusive military base support service contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.<\/p>\n Southern Development\u2019s Ghost Boss<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Beyond its powerful American connections, SOSi was well positioned for growth because it wasn\u2019t afraid to get dirty. In his thesis, Hartwig recommended offering the Afghan government \u201csome type of benefit\u201d to win support from \u201ckey leaders\u201d for future mineral projects. Through its subsidiary, that is exactly what SOSi did, apparently cutting the president\u2019s brother in on the deal.<\/p>\n Southern Development is a complex mishmash of entities that stretch from Afghanistan to the United Arab Emirates, but at its core, the company is a joint venture between SOSi and Hashmat Ghani.<\/p>\n A 2005 Kabul business directory and other archival documents reveal that Hashmat Ghani was the original owner of Southern Development. A Southern Development document on file in the Ras al-Khaimah Offshore Free Zone, the secretive United Arab Emirates jurisdiction where its full ownership records are held, confirms that on June 17, 2014 \u2014 three days after Ashraf Ghani was elected president \u2014 SOSi owned 80 percent of the company, with Hashmat Ghani owning the remainder.<\/p>\n A phone number listed in Southern Development\u2019s most recent Afghan corporate filings also matches the number registered to Hashmat Ghani\u2019s primary business entity, the Millennium Integrity Logistics Company.<\/p>\n His name was removed from Afghan corporate documents to avoid embarrassing Ashraf Ghani during his presidential campaign, according to a former SOSi employee who asked to remain anonymous because they continue to work in the field. Neither Hashmat Ghani nor President Ghani responded to questions sent by OCCRP.<\/p>\n It\u2019s unclear exactly how SOSi first connected with the president\u2019s family, but Hashmat Ghani\u2019s son, Sultan Ghani, listed a short SOSi internship in 2013 on his resume.<\/p>\n Sultan Ghani now runs The Ghani Group, the family\u2019s privately owned conglomerate with interests that include mining and military contracting. He apparently keeps in touch with old friends at SOSi. A photo uploaded to LinkedIn during the summer of 2019 shows him meeting with SOSi Vice President Helmick, and the account features praise for his interpersonal skills posted by another SOSi executive. SOSi did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n All the President\u2019s Mines<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Buying chromite from unlicensed local mines remains illegal in Afghanistan, but Ashraf Ghani\u2019s election opened a rich new vein of opportunity. While the American Task Force and his own son once urged legalization of artisanal mining, the president has instead redistributed bureaucratic power, enabling extralegal activities.<\/p>\n Until 2019, Afghanistan\u2019s Minister of Mines reviewed mining proposals and licenses. Now, all such documents are approved directly by the president, his cabinet or the High Economic Council, which he also heads.<\/p>\n \u201cThe ministry just has a figurative role,\u201d said a longtime civil servant with extensive experience of the process, who did not wish to be named for safety reasons. \u201cNothing goes through without the president\u2019s green light.\u201d<\/p>\n A document leaked to OCCRP reveals that on December 26, 2019, the High Economic Council, in a process overseen by the president, authorized Southern Development to take on a project far larger than the original task force project in Kunar. The company received a mineral processing permit and permission to purchase artisanal chromite in six Afghan provinces: Khost, Paktia, Paktika, Kunar, Ghazni and Maidan Wardak.<\/p>\n This chromite, which according to the document \u201cwas mined by local villagers over many years using rudimentary tools,\u201d must be processed in Kabul\u2019s District 12 neighborhood, where the Southern Development plant is located. The Ministry of Mines was instructed to oversee the entire process, and Afghan security forces and highway police were ordered to \u201ccooperate\u201d in securing \u201cthe transfer of the chromite ore.\u201d<\/p>\n Southern Development was also given permission to obtain 20,730 tons of locally mined chromite already under the control of the Afghan government, according to leaked correspondence between the company and the Ministry of Mines.<\/p>\n Southern Development, it turns out, had long been preparing for a greatly expanded workload.<\/p>\n In the spring of 2018, more than a year before Afghanistan\u2019s High Economic Council signed over the rights to the chromite, Southern Development\u2019s Kabul office had imported new crushing equipment from South Africa for its Afghan operation.<\/p>\n In fact, Global Venture and its consultants, according to Scott King, had since 2013 been \u201cadvising private sector investors\u201d with mining interests in Afghanistan about how to \u201cquietly\u201d restart initiatives like the Kunar chromite project. At the same 2019 Special Operations forum, she highlighted a mysterious $10 million investment into what she claimed were \u201clegal\u201d Afghan chromite mines.<\/p>\n Despite making gains in areas across the country, Southern Development was also trying to claim concessions it had not been granted. Until late 2019, the company\u00a0falsely claimed to have won chromite exploration rights\u00a0in Kabul province from Afghanistan\u2019s Ministry of Mines and Petroleum. The claim disappeared from the website after reporters asked about it.<\/p>\n Bigger Fish Circling<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Jodi Vittori, a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and former anti-corruption adviser for NATO in Afghanistan, said President Ghani uses control of lucrative mineral contracts to stay in power by \u201cmanaging the political settlement that helps balance the various forces there.\u201d<\/p>\n Multiple sources \u2014 including employees of the Ministry of Mines, current and former civil servants, and anti-corruption officials \u2014 speak of a ring of corruption controlled by a select cast of elites at the Presidential Palace and the High Economic Council.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you pay the right amount to the right person, they\u2019ll accept anything,\u201d said the longtime civil servant. \u201cMany people choose to pay, because success is guaranteed thanks to a tacit system by which if one member wants something to happen, the whole chain will agree.\u201d<\/p>\n Javed Noorani, an expert on Afghan mining, said corruption and cronyism are rampant in the state sector.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are networks in Arg [Afghanistan\u2019s Presidential Palace] that not only keep information from the president but also mislead him,\u201d he said. \u201cThese networks are involved in wholesale corruption both in appointing their cronies to key positions in state institutions, as well as giving contracts to their clients in return for money.\u201d<\/p>\n Mining takes time to generate profits and it\u2019s unclear if SOSi has started to see a return on its investments yet, but the price of chromite ore hovers around $200 per ton and with a worldwide market for stainless steel, Southern Development could become highly profitable. Meanwhile, its success is already spawning copycats.<\/p>\n Another American military contractor, DGCI, which is under federal investigation for its work in Iraq and Afghanistan, hired another former Task Force staffer in 2019, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to mine lithium in Afghanistan\u2019s Ghazni province. Since then, DGCI has also tried to cultivate a relationship with the Ghani family, holding public charity events with Sultan Ghani.<\/p>\n \u201cDGCI seeks to give back to the communities where we work and allocates a portion of its profits to charity every year,\u201d the company said in a statement about its relationship with Ghani. \u201cWe are proud to currently work with numerous organizations in Afghanistan and its diaspora through our charitable foundation.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Scott King in 2018 established a new company, De Zwan Ghar, which in the Pashto language means \u201cthe young mountain.\u201d In 2019 she presented the Ministry of Mines with a plan to buy and process oxide copper. That project, which again contravened mining regulations, was declined, \u201cbut the moment she manages to persuade someone close to the cabinet, the project might see the light,\u201d the longtime civil servant told OCCRP<\/p>\n ENDS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" MONITORING (SW) \u2013 An Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting (OCCRP) investigation found that the Afghan president\u2019s brother,\u00a0Hashmat Ghani, owns a significant stake in Southern Development, which operates a mineral processing plant on the outskirts of Kabul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4252,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[179,186,16,225,5,8,6],"tags":[12,274,533],"class_list":["post-4251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy-business","category-investigative-reports","category-report","category-corruption","category-politics_","category-governance","category-afghanistan","tag-afghanistan","tag-mining","tag-president-ghani"],"views":958,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.occrp.org\/assets\/investigations\/Sultan-Ghani-with-DGCI-Mustafa-Zamani.jpg\")
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