This article is the result of a collaboration with The Sunday Times. You can find their corresponding piece here.
A key leader of the Kinahan cartel who is wanted by authorities around the world and has been living in hiding in Dubai for a decade has just had his Emirates residence permit renewed.
A Bellingcat and The Sunday Times review of public immigration records from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has revealed that Christopher Kinahan Jr, the son of cartel founder Christy Kinahan, was issued with a new visa less than two weeks ago.
This is despite his status as a sanctioned individual who is the subject of a $5 million reward from the US government for information leading to his arrest.
Our analysis has also exposed the residence statuses of the crime gang’s other sanctioned leaders who remain at large in Dubai. The records include previously unknown companies where the cartel members are purportedly employed.
It comes after Christopher Jr’s older brother Daniel Kinahan lost his final appeal in Dubai last week to prevent being extradited back to Ireland. He is the second key figure of the crime group to be apprehended in the Emirates following his high-profile arrest in April.
The Kinahan Organised Crime Group is a $1.5 billion transnational network involved in drug trafficking, money laundering and arms smuggling. Investigators have connected it to Iran’s intelligence services and the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah.
The cartel’s senior leadership – Christy Kinahan, 69, and his sons Daniel, 49, and Christopher Jr, 45, their cousin Ian Dixon, 36, along with associates Sean McGovern, 40, Bernard Clancy, 48, and Johnny Morrissey, 66 – was sanctioned by the US government in 2022.
The UAE reportedly banned the Kinahans from doing business in the wake of the sanctions and the Emiratis also claim to have frozen €200 million in Kinahan assets. However, our findings suggest the cartel is still doing business in the Emirates and its leadership has repeatedly engaged with immigration authorities in the years following the sanctions.
The visa records were accessed through publicly available UAE government websites. We entered data contained in the US government’s sanctions notice, including the gang members’ ID or passport number, birth date and nationality, to view their immigration files.
*Bellingcat searched the Dubai government’s identity and foreign affairs portal by inputting data about the
cartel’s leadership that was contained in the US government’s sanctions notice. Searching the gang
members’ ID or passport number, birth date and nationality returned a
“Unified Number”, a unique identifier assigned to every UAE visa holder.
This number, when entered with the other identity information on a UAE federal government portal, returned
the visa holder’s current status, history and file number.
Roy McComb, a former deputy director of the UK’s National Crime Agency, told The Sunday Times it was preposterous to suggest that the UAE did not know the visa status of the cartel members in Dubai.
“How is Christy Kinahan in the UAE unlawfully and the authorities there are unwilling to take appropriate action? The Kinahans are not an unknown entity, they are at the very apex of organised crime,” he said. “For the UAE not to know their residency status beggars belief.”
David Haigh, a British solicitor who was imprisoned on fraud charges in Dubai and now assists victims of abuse in the region, said it was clear the cartel must be paying off officials. “If someone is living openly there for a long period of time with that level of heat, that to me shows there’s been corruption involved,” he said. “If they were using false passports to enter Dubai, that’s a serious federal offence.”
The passport details publicly listed in the US sanctions provide an unprecedented glimpse into the timeline of the cartel leadership’s visa history, giving an overview of their initial entry and exit to the Emirates.
The records show that four of the six key gang members had entered the UAE long before the 2016 attempt on Daniel Kinahan’s life in Dublin and the ensuing deadly feud that led to the cartel’s full relocation to the UAE.
A passport number for Christopher Kinahan Jr is linked to short-term UAE visas issued as early as September 2013. A passport number listed for Daniel Kinahan, searched in combination with an alternative sanctions-listed date of birth that is not his real one, returned seven short-term UAE visas between 2013 and 2015. It is not known what name this passport was under, but Daniel Kinahan has reportedly held illegitimate passports in the past.
A short-term visa for details associated with Ian Dixon first appeared in 2015. Authorities allege that Dixon acted as a trusted lieutenant to Daniel Kinahan by helping move bulk cash across Europe, arranging payments and keeping tabs on money owed by a narco-trafficker. In June, we revealed that Dixon was the poster boy for a padel club in Dubai, where he has been captured playing the racquet sport on webcams.
The earliest visas found for details associated with Sean McGovern and Bernard Clancy were from March and April 2016 respectively, the months after the 2016 attack in Dublin.
All key members of the group, with the exception of crime boss Christy Kinahan, gained residency in the UAE using Irish passports. The cartel founder’s British passport number is linked to his immigration file; both to his latest residence permit and four previous temporary visas. Records show the first visa associated with this passport was issued in February 2007 – the earliest known instance of Christy Kinahan entering the UAE. Another was issued in November 2009, and then two more in 2017.
However, details for an Irish passport under one of Christy Kinahan’s aliases (“Christopher O’Brien”) return 31 separate records on the UAE’s visa inquiry portal between 2014 and 2017. Bellingcat confirmed this passport number was associated with the name Christopher O’Brien after discovering both in corporate documents for a now-defunct Hong Kong firm that was incorporated in February 2014. This suggests Kinahan may have been using a false passport to travel to and from the UAE in addition to traveling under his authentic document. A man was jailed in 2003 after admitting he supplied “fraudulently obtained genuine passports” to criminals, including Kinahan.
One short-term UAE visa issued for “Christopher O’Brien” ended on August 19, 2015. Posts on LinkedIn three days later showed Christy Kinahan – wearing black-framed glasses and named in the posts as “Christopher O’Brien” – surrounded by Iranian and Turkish businessmen in a high-rise company office in Ankara. These images, discovered by Bellingcat in posts under the name of the managing director of a now-defunct Turkish investment company, have since been deleted.
According to the Dubai government, employment-based residence visas are valid for two years and must be obtained by a company on its employee’s behalf. The employer is required to apply for a work permit through the UAE’s Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratization. The employee must pass a fitness test before their employer can apply for the residence permit.
The company names on Clancy and Kinahan Jr’s residence permits, Al Matn Goods Wholesalers and Island Star Tourism respectively, match existing firms in Dubai. However, Bellingcat was unable to confirm whether these entities are the same as the ones listed on the residence permits. It is also not known why Clancy’s residence permit only includes his first and middle names (“Bernard Patrick”) while the other cartel members’ visas used their full names.
The firm named on Christy Kinahan’s permit, OSA Management Consultancies, is listed as an aviation consultancy on a Dubai government registry. In addition to sharing an address with cartel-linked firm CV Aviation Consulting Services, UAE company data accessed on Horizons, a platform created by Washington DC-based nonprofit C4ADS that aggregates public records, shows that both firms also have the same business licence number and date of incorporation, suggesting OSA may be a newer name for the same entity.
The managing director of Island Star Tourism told Bellingcat on the phone that Christopher Kinahan Jr was working as “commission-based staff, not in-office staff”. He confirmed he recognised Christopher Kinahan Jr’s name but said he had never met him. Asked how the company name appeared on his visa, he said “I don’t know”. He said if the UAE had any problem with Christopher Kinahan Jr, it would “not give permission”.
Al Matn Goods Wholesalers and OSA Management Consultancies did not respond to questions from Bellingcat.
The UAE foreign ministry has been approached for comment.
Connor Plunkett, Peter Barth, Beau Donelly and John Mooney contributed to this article. Scroll-driven interactive by Connor Plunkett and Miguel Ramalho.
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