Pierre Dadak

Pierre Konrad Dadak (born 28 March 1976) is a French-Polish alleged arms dealer and fraudster. He is a controversial character portrayed in media as being at the center of a web of corruption extending from Europe to Africa. Dadak maintains his innocence, telling a Spanish court in 2018: "I am being made to pass for a Pablo Escobar, but I am nothing and I am not charged with drug or arms trafficking". In 2018, the Times referred him as one of Europe's leading arms dealers"

Private life Dadak was born in Paris, the son of Polish immigrants. Though Dadak grew up in Paris, he also holds Polish citizenship. Dadak grew up in an upper-middle-class family in the 18th arrondissement. He was educated at the Lycée Jules Ferry and at an elite business school, the Institut supérieur de gestion, graduating in 1999.

Between 2000 and 2006, Dadak was arrested five times in France and was "known [to police] for offenses of concealment, fraud, use of false administrative documents, tax evasion, theft, and voluntary violence." Dadak presented himself as the "shareholder president" of Rosevar Holdings, which was a subsidiary of Bumar.

In December 2012, Bumar ended its relationship with Dadak, terminating him for his failure to make any sales. Dadak is reported to have spent €20,000 on turning his Ibiza villa into a fortress with bullet-proof windows and motion-detector sensors on the grounds. One Frenchman living on Ibiza, Cyril Peret, told the media: "On the island, he didn't have many friends; his lifestyle scared people a little". News reports claim he was delinquent on paying the half-million euro debt he was alleged to have run up on his credit card. One businessman who first met Dadak at the Szpilka cafe in Warsaw in the fall of 2011 remembered him for wearing an expensive coat made of rabbit fur and for driving a Porsche, giving off the air of luxury and extravagance.

In October 2013, Dadak went to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, together with two Canadian businessmen to meet President Michel Martelly with a $20 billion plan to develop Île-à-Vache, an island which as a French police report noted is "known as a storage place for cocaine in transit to the United States or Europe." He went with a former Haitian senator Joseph Lambert to Île-à-Vache and accordingly to the same police report "for an unknown reason [Dadak] threatened the former Senator Joseph Lambert with death."After causing a ruckus by trying to "obtain discount on the final hotel bill" at his hotel, Dadak left Port-au-Prince without paying his hotel bill. notary in Barcelona, Ibiza and Madrid, Polietica was created in 1999 and has subsidiaries in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, UK and USA. According to the Spanish company register and an American accounting company, it has a capital of 235,000,000 euros and a turnover of more than 5 billion USD in 2018. In Belgium, a police investigation of Polietica was started on the suspicion of "carousel VAT fraud" as the police believed that Dadak was engaged in transactions between his companies with the intention to avoid paying VAT. In February 2014, Dadak was briefly arrested in Ibiza after he was alleged to have made death threats via email to a local property manager who he had a dispute with. The charges were dropped after Dadak claimed diplomatic immunity. In May 2014, Dadak is said by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to have used a Polietica email address under the false name of Jennifer Forbes to make contact with SPLM-IO rebels fighting in the South Sudanese civil war promising to sell them 40,000 AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles, 30,000 machine guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. As the European Union had placed an embargo on arms sales to South Sudan in 2011, such sales would be illegal.

Arrested On 14 July 2016, Dadak was arrested in his Ibiza home. Dadak was arrested in his underwear while attempting to leave his villa via a window. In 2016, it was reported that police believe that Dadak had laundered some €15 million into real estate and other property in Spain via a series of shell companies. The police allege that Dadak purchased weapons on the black market in Eastern Europe; shipped them to The Gambia via his Polietica companies registered in Belgium, Germany, Britain and France; and invested the profits into Spanish real estate while also blackmailing his business partners. The NCA has resorted to Unexplained Wealth Orders (UWOs) as it is almost impossible for the police to assemble evidence to bring charges against those suspected of money laundering.

On 24 April 2017, the United Nations Panel of Experts on South Sudan in its Final Report regarding gunrunning into South Sudan asked for a world-wide arms embargo on both sides in the South Sudanese civil war and singled out Dadak as one of the arms dealers whose gun-running help the war continue. Dadak was alleged to have stated that the SPLA-IO had "approached" him looking to buy weapons rather than the other way around. However, the meeting was cancelled after two of the four informants were kidnapped. Jammeh's private secretary Njogu Bah, who was present at the Jammeh-Dadak meetings, has refused requests for comment from the Gambian media. About allegations of making death threats, Dadak admitted that he did indeed say and write the things that he was alleged to have done, claiming that he was only "hot-blooded", and maintained that he did not actually want to kill anybody. In May 2021, Dadak attracted attention in the Netherlands where he was seen socializing in Spain with the Dutch rapper Jorik Scholten, better known by his stage name Lil' Kleine. In August 2021, Dadak attracted much media attention in France when he was seen in public with the French model and actress Maeva Ghennam. Ghennam posted a photograph of herself with Dadak on her Instragam account, sparking speculation that she was engaged in a relationship with him.

On 7 September 2021, Dadak was brought to trial on charges of fraud. Dadak had claimed that his Ibiza villa had been robbed in July 2015 and maintained that he had lost two insured watches, a Rolex Daytona worth 26 thousand euros and an Audemars Piguet worth 23 thousand euros, both of which the insurance company had paid out for.

Andrew Feinstein, the South African author of The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade and an expert on global corruption stated in an interview: "Dadak's story reflects the complete amoral nature of the arms trade. The distinction between arms dealers and grifters is extremely fuzzy. A lot of these people are almost caricatures, they have huge personalities, they're delusional. The extraordinary thing is how company after company, government after government, actually fall for these people. And the reason they do it is because everything that happens in this trade is secret, so it provides absolutely fertile ground for these sorts of conmen". the Spanish Ministry of Interior describes Dadak as a dangerous fugitive who was wanted by the Interpol. Dadak was wanted for fraud, identity theft, and money laundering.

Dadak is alleged to have been the main architect in an elaborate scheme where dozens of people were defrauded around the world. It is alleged that Dadak claimed to be a representative for the famous British Harrods department store, hence the name for the operation: Operación Harrods. The exact details of the fraud are currently not known. Based on the official press release, the evidence against Dadak is at least partially derived from money transactions. Dadak allegedly controlled the account where the defrauded funds were first received and from where they were further diverted to accounts based in Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Latvia, Monaco, Poland, Spain, the Arab Emirates, the United States, and Vietnam. After Dadak's arrest, his villa in Ibiza was searched. Dadak was held in custody for the entire time and extradited to the USA in March 2025.

Extradition and subsequent detention Despite his resistance, Dadak was extradited from Madrid in a highly secretive operation to New York on March 13, 2025.

According to an unsealed indictment (USA v. Dadak, 1:23-cr-125) Dadak was charged by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York for wire fraud (pretending to represent a luxury brand and stealing), aggravated identity theft, extortion and transactions involving a diamond-encrusted watch and a luxury vehicle. Further investigations against Dadak are ongoing and a superseding indictment will likely follow.

On April 4 based on a plea deal Dadak plead guilty to a single count of Wire Fraud. Sentencing was set for July 9 at 11:30 am.

According to the Bureau of Prisons website, Dadak was issued prisoner's Register Number: 66699-511, and is currently not in BOP custody.

Sentence

On July 9, 2025 Dadak was sentenced in New York to 36 months in Federal custody, with no supervised release. Dadak was also ordered to pay a special assessment fee of $100, and to forfeit $1,050,515.19. Dadak's detention was continued. Due to his arrest in mid June 2023 he will be released in mid June 2026.

Lawsuit in Delaware A lawsuit was filed on August 4, 2025 in Delaware Court of Chancery seeking a declaration of sole member of a Delaware-chartered company. According to the filing, Dadak "fraudulently made, caused to be made, filed, or caused to be filed, false records” seizing control of an enterprise over which he never exercised any legitimate authority".

Legal activities The National Court has closed the investigation against controversial businessman Pierre Konrad Dadak, who was based on the island and arrested at his home in Sant Josep in 2016 as part of an operation against an organization being investigated for money laundering, bribery, threats, attempted murder, drug trafficking, and weapons trafficking. According to the digital news outlet El Confidencial, after seven years of investigation, the Court has concluded that the operations carried out were legal.

The businessman was arrested in a police macro-operation that was deployed in various parts of the island, with the main focus on the villa where Dadak was arrested, in Caló d'en Real, Sant Josep. More than fifty troops participated in the operation, which was carried out by the National Police Corps.

The investigation began in October 2014 after a complaint by the Prosecutor's Office before the National Court, according to the digital newspaper.