🇳🇱🇸🇱 He was one of the world’s most wanted men. So he bought a west African country

Jos Leijdekkers is one of Europe’s most wanted criminals. His greatest caper yet looks to be the takeover of a country. In half a decade Leijdekkers has turned Sierra Leone, a place previously best known for blood diamonds, into a hub for billions of dollars’ worth of Colombian cocaine, disguised as rice or plantain chips, which pass through each year en route to Europe.

By funnelling a share of the profits to Sierra Leone’s political elite and funding large parts of the state itself, Leijdekkers has amassed perks that would be the envy of a Bond villain. He is believed to have a Sierra Leonean diplomatic passport. The police and military establishment bow to him, squadrons of container ships and submarines ply the shores at his command, and he is escorted in a motorcade by the presidential guard beneath a cloud of drones.

For decades Africa played a minor role in the world of cocaine trafficking. In the 1980s, when the mass export of Latin American cocaine began, the smugglers sent their product straight to Europe aboard cargo ships. By the 1990s Rotterdam, the continent’s biggest container port, had emerged as the preferred destination. In 2000 a quarter of the 200 tonnes of cocaine reaching Europe was believed to enter through its docks. Within two decades nearly 50 tonnes were being seized each year at the port by customs officials, who estimated that they found less than a fifth of the cocaine dispatched to their quays.

Fighting the narco-traffickers was a game of cat and mouse. In the 2000s Dutch officials rolled out new mobile scanning units that could manoeuvre around a port and examine any container with ease. In response, the cartels built their own version in the Colombian Amazon, which they used to determine whether cocaine could go undetected within a consignment of cocoa beans (it could not) or be successfully smuggled inside sections of steel machinery (it could). In the late 2010s, when it had become clear that the criminal organisations also had some Rotterdam customs officials in their pockets, the port authorities took countermeasures: customs-workers were no longer told in advance which containers they would handle on any given day.

The tenfold increase in seizures between 2017 and 2021 seemed to be evidence that the port’s methods were effective. Yet when I arrived in Rotterdam this May, I found that seizures had slumped again, from 70 tonnes in 2021 to 12 in 2025. Plenty of cocaine is still being manufactured: production volumes in Colombia are believed to be at an all-time high. And plenty is reaching Europe: the current street price is €15,000 ($17,400) per kilo, the lowest figure ever recorded. Sewage samples confirm that up to 60,000 lines of cocaine are snorted every day in Rotterdam alone.

So how are drugs reaching Europe? One answer is the African connection, the importance of which has soared in recent years. In the mid-2000s, Latin American gangs looking to diversify their trafficking routes began to send some of their goods by fishing boat across the Atlantic to west Africa. The cargo would be hustled northwards by pickup through the Sahel or by trawler to the Mediterranean. At first the main entry point was the minuscule nation of Guinea-Bissau. By 2006 so much cocaine was passing through that fishermen took to whitewashing their houses with it.

Fast forward two decades and it is estimated that one-third of the cocaine reaching Europe now arrives via west Africa. Guinea-Bissau has been superseded by Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Cape Verde, but the logistics remain the same. Cocaine is kept in warehouses, often for months at a time, before being dispatched in small boats to the Mediterranean. Sometimes the destination is a mid-size port like Marseille or Gioia Tauro in Calabria. Other times, it is just a remote beach. “The problem used to be Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg,” a customs analyst in Rotterdam told me. “Now it’s the entire southern coast of Europe!”

🔗 https://unwall.app/www.economist.com/interactive/1843/2026/09/18/cocaine-trafficking-sierra-leone?etear=nl_weekly_1

⛽️ 🇦🇺 🚗 Australia could face diesel rationing within weeks and prices above A$4 a litre, nearly 40% above today, if the US goes ahead with its export ban, the most worrying development in global fuel markets since the war began, per MST Marquee's head of energy research.

Australia is the world's largest importer of diesel in absolute terms, accounting for 1% of global fuel demand but 10% of the world's seaborne diesel imports, and it runs an economy weighted to agriculture and mining. A ban could force the government to stage 3 and 4 of its National Fuel Security Plan, which covers demand reduction and directed allocation of supply.

The US exports about 1.3 million barrels of diesel a day, a quarter of its refining output, and has been covering the gap left as Russia and China stopped exporting refined fuels.

The UK is now preparing rationing plans of its own, with 42 days of diesel left as of July.

📎 Hormuz Letter

⛽️ 🇬🇧 🚗 The UK currently holds only 42 days of diesel in its emergency stockpiles. While the UK stands at just 42 days, countries like Italy hold 347 days, the USA has 677 days and Canada and Japan maintain over 1,000 days of supply.

In the early 2000s, Britain held over 100 days of diesel reserves. However, as major domestic oil refineries closed down over the years, the country's massive storage tanks disappeared with them, leaving the UK heavily reliant on just-in-time imports.

That is the jeopardy facing every supermarket shelf, every hospital delivery, every harvest, every bin collection and every freight train that still keeps Britain functioning. And the system that supplies that fuel security has been allowed to grow dangerously thin.

Meanwhile the UK’s ability to make that fuel itself has been dismantled. From eighteen refineries in the 1970s to nine at the turn of the century, Britain is now down to just four: Domestic demand already exceeded refining capacity before those closures. The gap is filled by imports - more than half of the diesel that goes into British tanks.

This has happened through a long succession of terrible government choices and neglect that treated energy security as an afterthought. Carbon costs were loaded onto plants that operate here, while higher-carbon fuel could be imported without equivalent burden. Almost every government over the past 20 years helped to create this looming crisis.

Diesel is the engine room of the economy. And successive governments have allowed the tanks to run towards empty.

📎 James Melville

⛽ 🇦🇺 🚗 Australia burns more diesel per person than any OECD country.

At 1.10 tons of oil equivalent per capita, Australia sits almost double the OECD average.

Mining, agriculture and transport are the reasons why.

Norway is second at 0.90.

Canada follows at 0.75.

Both tell a similar story: resource extraction and long hauls across empty land.

The bottom of the list looks completely different.

Japan sits at 0.30, Mexico at 0.16, both well below the US at 0.60 and Germany at 0.59.

Diesel demand tracks industry, not wealth.

Rich countries built around mining and farming use far more of it than rich countries built around dense cities and rail.

📎 Jack Prandelli

🗳 🇬🇧 📊 MRP | Labour 76 Seats Short:

🌹 LAB: 250 | 26%
➡️ RFM: 147 | 24%
🌳 CON: 125 | 22%
🔶 LDM: 63 | 11%
🎗️ SNP: 27 | 2%
🌼 PC: 6 | 1%
🌍 GRN: 3 | 8%
◼️ RES: 1 | 3%
🙋 Oth: 9 | 2%

Via More in Common, 21 Aug - 21 Sep.

📎 electionmapsuk