<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/30/why-1bn-in-balkans-energy-contracts-are-going-to-an-obscure-company-connected-to-donald-trump>
"On a graffitied Sarajevo backstreet, a path leads past an overgrown patch of
garden to a white door. Beyond is the registered office of a company that is on
the brink of winning contracts worth more than $1bn.
AAFS Infrastructure and Energy is close to securing a concession to build and
operate a pipeline across the Balkans to allow fossil gas shipped from the US
to replace supplies that come from Russia. “This could be the most important
infrastructure project ever in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” says one of the
country’s top officials, who, like others, asks to remain anonymous to discuss
sensitive negotiations.
The company has no record of even attempting anything close to this scale. What
it does have is personal connections to Donald Trump.
One of AAFS’s representatives is a Washington lawyer who has acted for the
Trumps in political cases. The other is the brother of the president’s former
national security adviser. Both were part of a campaign that is close to
Trump’s heart: the effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential
election.
A
Guardian investigation, based on interviews with current and former Bosnian
and US officials, leaked documents and corporate paperwork, has examined the
obscure company that has been thrust into the global struggle for energy
supremacy. It offers a glimpse of how international relations are changing
under a presidency that blurs the line between government policy and the
enrichment of the ruling family and those around it.
“There is a logic, in our current world, of having administration-connected
people involved in big economic projects or investments,” says a former senior
US official in the region. “It is unsavoury but so much of my country’s
politics is unsavoury these days.”
In the former Yugoslavia, the stakes are higher than just who might get rich.
US intervention could undermine the peace deal it brokered in 1995 to end a war
that killed 100,000, many of them Muslim Bosniak civilians massacred by Serb
paramilitaries. A generation on, Bosnia’s ethnic leaders are still manoeuvring
for advantage.
US officials have left Bosnia’s leaders in no doubt about what the Trump
administration wants: the go-ahead for AAFS’s pipeline."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
