The Sentry
Gadalla’s Ubiquity
Ventures controlled by Gadalla span an extensive range of sectors, including oil refining, food, steel, telecommunications, aviation, maritime shipping, consulting, and cement, the last of which is through the scandal surrounding Jan Marsalek, a Moscow-linked Austrian fugitive wanted in Germany in connection with the $2.1 billion accounting fraud that drove Wirecard’s 2020 collapse.
In 2024, Gadalla established an information technology company in the UK and bought a Malta-based seaport services company. Yet none of these official undertakings seem able to explain the extent of his wealth. His wife frequents Milan’s luxury boutiques, while he flaunts a $500,000 Richard Mille watch.
He carries a St. Kitts passport and flies on private jets. He stays at premium hotels like the Bvlgari Hotel London in Knightsbridge, where he spent Boxing Day 2024. Gadalla owns eight real estate properties in the UAE worth a total of about $1.7 million, not to mention a $3.7 million condominium in one of Toronto’s poshest neighborhoods.
Gadalla, who maintains permanent residency in Canada, is even a donor to Toronto’s prestigious Sinai Health Foundation. Through his numerous activities, Gadalla has both enjoyed the protection of the Haftar family and played an essential role in expanding their influence in eastern Libya.
He has consolidated a startling array of roles, enabled by his sponsors’ grip on territory and infrastructure—leverage used to intimidate bankers and shuttle goods and cash across borders.
Fundamentally, Gadalla’s success rests on privilege underwritten by the coercive reach of Haftar’s armed network. particularly coveted given the reconstruction drive underway in eastern Libya since 2023. Gadalla’s operations extend across multiple jurisdictions, including Libya, the UAE, Malta, and the UK.
Toward Conflict: A Plan, a Bank, and
a Financier
By October 2018, the Emirati government and the Haftar family had agreed to launch a full‑scale land and air campaign against Tripoli. Russia’s Wagner Group, which was already deployed to Libya for Haftar’s assault on the eastern Libyan city of Derna in May 2018, was willing to fulfill a combat function but demanded steady cash. Financing the Tripoli operation, of which the Wagner Group was only a partial component, necessitated dependable offshore channels to move dollars.
The UAE and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia are suspected to have supplied the bulk of the funding required for Haftar’s offensive on the Libyan capital. An economic advisor to the Haftar family, Farhat Benqdara, had recently become chairman of al-Masraf, the commercial bank headquartered in Abu Dhabi. Jointly owned by the UAE, Libya, and Algeria, the bank offered precisely what the Haftars needed: the means to move dollars discretely, away from Libyan regulators. To reinforce this external funding of the military operation, Haftar’s network called on Gadalla, thus giving a prominent role to a younger financier who had operated in Dubai since 2008.
Gadalla had run afoul of Emirati state security sometime between 2016 and 2018 owing to suspected money transactions involving high risk entities. However, ahead of the attack on Tripoli, intervention by Field Marshal Haftar convinced Abu Dhabi to rehabilitate Gadalla. Allowed to resume business through his three Dubai-based companies, he became a key operative for war financing.106 By early 2019, Gadalla stood ready to act.
Haftar’s forces receive $300 million via the UAE With Benqdara as chairman, al-Masraf extended $300 million in loans to three obscure companies controlled by Gadalla in 2019: JTA General Trading LLC, al-Mored Oasis General Trading LLC, and AMAA General Trading LLC. According to a senior LFB official and several other sources, the money, which left Gadalla’s companies almost immediately, funded Haftar’s LAAF operations and most likely bankrolled Wagner mercenaries’ deployment in the context of the April 2019 Tripoli offensive.
Officially, al-Masraf serves corporations, government bodies, and small and medium-sized enterprises. Its traditional lending is anchored in trade finance, including letters of credit and guarantees, short-term working-capital facilities, and term loans. Gadalla’s three Dubai-based entities present themselves as general trading firms engaged in import-export and wholesale distribution across everyday commodities and supplies, including foodstuffs and construction-related materials, as well as office or industrial goods.
It is under this official framework that al-Masraf extended $300 million to Gadalla’s three companies. Yet before extending the loans, al-Masraf secured a precaution difficult to reconcile with routine commercial lending to creditworthy borrowers: a guarantee deposit from the LFB equal to the full loan amount.
Through this arrangement, the LFB absorbed 100% of the risk. If the three borrowers failed to repay and al-Masraf declared the loans a permanent loss, the Abu Dhabi bank could execute the guarantee and seize the LFB’s $300 million deposit outright. Put differently, public funds from Tripoli underwrote the loans to companies that channeled cash into Haftar’s war on Tripoli.
According to a senior LFB official, al-Masraf’s demand for a guarantee deposit from the LFB suggests the Abu Dhabi-based bank understood the hazards of lending a large sum to Gadalla’s entities, given their meager assets, business records, and revenue streams. JTA General Trading LLC, alMored Oasis General Trading LLC, and AMAA General Trading LLC did not respond to The Sentry’s requests for comment.
The UAE has frequently served as a hub in Wagner-linked revenue chains; moreover, a US government assessment found that the UAE may have specifically funded the Wagner Group’s 2019–2020 operations in Libya. Gadalla’s three Dubai-based entities later appeared on a blacklist issued by the CBL owing to suspected letter-of-credit fraud, with an investigation by the Libyan attorney general pending.
These elements—combined with the Wagner Group’s extensive combat role in the 2019–2020 assault on Tripoli and the Russian mercenary firm’s well-documented practice of routing payments through channels designed to obscure their origin—reinforce the allegation of The Sentry’s sources that at least part of the $300 million in loaned funds went to Wagner.
Gadalla did not respond to The Sentry’s request for comment. When launching his offensive on the Libyan capital, Field Marshal Haftar vowed to achieve a lightning victory. Such a military win would have handed the Haftar family the CBL, the LFB, and the NOC, along with the contracting power of government ministries—enough leverage to funnel public money back to the three Dubai-based companies through sweetheart deals and erase all traces of the fraud.
Instead, the offensive lingered for 14 months and ended in ruin after Turkey intervened. A tacit Russian– Turkish agreement ordered Wagner Group combatants to pull back in late May 2020, which compelled Haftar’s fighters to abruptly abandon the outskirts of the capital in disarray a few days later.
During the long stalemate that followed the civil war’s end on June 6, 2020, the Wagner Group continued to demand payment, even as Haftar’s finances dried up. In 2020, Gadalla’s companies did not repay the $300 million they received in 2019. When al-Masraf closed its 2020 accounting, it posted a net annual loss of $240 million, resulting from “impairment charges” of about $375 million, which Chairman Benqdara blamed on the COVID-19 pandemic.
The hit was likely the only annual net loss al-Masraf had posted in its recent history.139 Ernst & Young, al-Masraf’s auditor for Fiscal Year 2020, issued a standard audit opinion, stating that al-Masraf’s 2020 financial statements were free from material misstatements. But Benqdara’s COVID-19 explanation masked the truth: out of the $375 million loss, a significant portion seems to have had little to do with the coronavirus. The $300 million principal paid out in 2019 was funneled into a failed war of aggression, and for the most part, remains unpaid.
Ernst & Young did not respond to The Sentry’s request for comment. After the LAAF’s mid-2020 defeat in northwestern Libya, Russian personnel became permanently entrenched in air bases across central and southern Libya, still drawing recurring payments from the Haftar family for a static, non-combat function—costly, but less so than the offensive that preceded it.
Gadalla continued to operate businesses in Dubai and other locales. Benqdara retained his role as chairman of al-Masraf even after he returned to Libya in 2022 to head the NOC, a move that further politicized the institution, increased the opacity of its operations, and brought it more firmly under the Haftar family’s sway.
In April 2021, the LFB, as a major shareholder of al-Masraf, sent a letter to Benqdara demanding clarification about the exceptional losses recorded the previous year. The LFB faced the risk that al-Masraf could move to enforce its claim on the guarantee deposits posted in 2019 as collateral to protect al-Masraf against default by the three UAE-based companies. But al-Masraf did not crystallize the loss; it continued marking the loans as non-performing rather than unrecoverable.
Also in 2021, the borrowers made a $70 million partial principal repayment, reducing al-Masraf’s outstanding loan balance from $300 million to $230 million. This $230 million balance remained outstanding as of January 2025. In late 2025, a source told The Sentry the borrowers may have made another small repayment, but those claims could not be independently verified. In 2024, the LFB presented documentation to the Libyan Attorney General’s Office, seeking a formal inquiry, which was launched that year.
A senior LFB official told The Sentry that the 2019 al-Masraf loans of constitute one of the most sensitive and controversial cases in Libyan banking, alluding to the powerful leaders they implicate. At the time of publication, nobody, including Gadalla, has been held accountable, and the Libyan Attorney General’s inquiry, which seems to focus on former LFB general manager Jamal, remains ongoing. None of the parties involved in the $300 million transaction, including Gadalla and his three Dubai-based companies, al-Masraf, or the LFB, responded to The Sentry’s requests for comment.
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