The Sentry
Gadalla Now: The Haftars’ Fixer for Money and Arms
A Convenient Playbook
In 2020, the Haftar family carried out its first significant move into Benghazi’s private sector. They set their sights on Berniq Airways, a private airline co-founded in 2018 by Fayez Bushnaf.
The entrepreneur is the nephew of Ibrahim Bushnaf, who served as interior minister in Abdullah al-Thani’s eastern-based government from 2018 until 2021 before being appointed Libya’s national security advisor by the eastern-based House of Representatives, a post he still held at the time of publication.
In addition to being the relative of a senior pro-Haftar official, Fayez Bushnaf used his commercial success to fund the Haftar family’s war effort starting in 2014.
In 2020, however, tides shifted, and armed pressure from Saddam Haftar and his allies forced Fayez Bushnaf to surrender his shares in the airline and leave Libya.
A distinct structural shift occurred that year. As the Haftar family deepened their territorial and military hegemony in northeastern Libya, the existence of independent commercial entities seemed to become unacceptable.
They initiated a campaign to subjugate almost every viable enterprise in the private sector, demanding total subservience. This policy meant the end of Berniq’s autonomy. Despite Bushnaf’s record of support for the Haftars, they turned against him and took over his airline.
The move was not precipitated by defiance or insurrection on the part of the entrepreneur but was rather an extension of absolute power. Indeed, across almost all sectors of eastern Libya’s economy, a clear pattern has emerged in recent years: no business is allowed to succeed unless it comes under the Haftars’ sway.
The Haftar family installed loyal proxies to take over Bushnaf’s surrendered shares.
This modus operandi, which is central to the family’s stranglehold over eastern Libya’s economy, creates a layered power structure in which formal ownership is largely cosmetic.
The Haftar-appointed shareholders who appear in corporate registries do not, in practice, exercise meaningful authority; they can be replaced at will and serve primarily as figureheads.
At the same time, the Haftars themselves set strategic priorities but do not run day-to-day affairs. The result is an operational vacuum that is filled by a distinct class of intermediaries whose names seldom appear in the official paperwork.
These intermediaries handle business operations, master the financial details, and arrange the more controversial transactions requested by the Haftars. Gadalla is the archetype of this category.
His authority did not derive from any equity stake or formal corporate title but from the Haftars’ need for a trusted operator capable of managing daily affairs on their behalf. Within such an opaque and informal dynamic, second-tier actors like Gadalla enjoy a degree of leeway that also allows them to enrich themselves.
Capturing the Bank of Commerce and Development
This arrangement was in force with the Haftar takeover of Benghazi’s BCD in 2022. Employing the same tactics used against Bushnaf and his airline, the Haftars turned on an ally and compelled the BCD founder, Jamal Tayeb Abdel Malek, to surrender his shares.
On paper the BCD chair passed to Haftar loyalist Wassim al‑Zway—genuine authority, however, flowed to Saddam Haftar’s circle. Concretely, this has meant that Gadalla influenced the day-to-day operations of BCD, the inner workings of which he would have already been exposed to thanks to several years serving as BCD founder Abdel Malek’s protégé.
The Haftars’ protection enabled Gadalla to handle sensitive financial decisions for the bank,184 and he rose to become BCD’s de facto chief. Although modest in size, BCD’s status as a Benghazi‑headquartered private bank turned it into a bellwether, enabling Gadalla to grow into a powerful mogul in his own right.
The BCD did not respond to The Sentry’s request for comment.
Circulating Russian Counterfeit Dinars
As early as May 2016, the Russian state firm Goznak had begun shipping billions in dinar banknotes to Haftar’s camp, just after the eastern government lost UN recognition.
Roughly 14 billion dinars entered circulation in this fashion.
The Haftar family handed the cash out as LAAF salaries and other payouts; many of the Russian-printed banknotes were sold on the parallel market for dollars used to buy military resources, including Russian mercenary services, causing the dinar to depreciate.
In 2020, US pressure helped block further Goznak deliveries from Russia. However, the influx of Russian-printed dinars to eastern Libya resumed in the autumn of 2022, after Gadalla took control of the BCD for the Haftar family.
Then CBL governor Kabir, who was drifting toward a pro-Haftar stance while feuding with Prime Minister Dabaiba, limited himself to muted complaints.
Because Washington heightened US military surveillance of Russian cargo flights over the Mediterranean in the spring of 2023, the Haftar family adopted a two‑track approach: Goznak occasionally smuggled pallets of high‑grade banknotes into Libya, while it also helped set up a less advanced press in eastern Benghazi, within the Tocra area.
Quality was inferior, but overall injections of unauthorized dinars had reached about 10 billion in circulation as of October 2025, mainly in two categories of new 50‑dinar notes.
Based on The Sentry’s interviews with banking officials and others in the banking sector, Gadalla was the main person overseeing the distribution of these counterfeit dinars.
First, the BCD processed all deposits of such notes as legitimate, boxing the Tripoli CBL into accepting them. Second, Gadalla’s network sold hundreds of millions of Russian-printed dinars against dollars on the black market in combination with assurance that Benghazi commercial banks would accept those dinar notes, a practice that further weakened the Libyan dinar.
Gadalla didn’t respond to The Sentry’s request for comment. In April 2025, after more than a year of efforts, the Tripoli CBL retired all 50‑dinar notes—including its own official print runs—and even implied that 20‑dinar bills were affected too, suggesting that Russian counterfeiting spread beyond the fifties.
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