Regarding the concerns raised by Gomes, BMJ told BIRN: “There is absolutely no reason for Ana Gomes to be concerned, we support the local economy by employing local labor and purchasing local material.

“We fully understand that historically Montenegro has a bad reputation due to the tobacco smuggling organized by the Big Tobacco Industry in/via Montenegro.”

In an interview with BIRN, Gomes said that the issue of cigarette smuggling through Montenegro needed to be taken “very seriously” by Brussels.

“There has to be implications in terms of demanding that they clean up their act,” she said.

“It cannot be overlooked, because of the amount of money being lost from public coffers but because these criminal organisations involved in organising cigarette smuggling have clear links to terrorist organisations.

“This period of negotiations must be, as it has been in other cases, a period of transformation of the country and if the country is depending on this kind of illegal, criminal activity to survive economically, I think the role of the EU is to [..] demand this transformation.”

Going dark

BIRN teamed up with ship-monitoring service MarineTraffic.com to track down whether the ships, and the cargo, had reached their declared destination.

Of the nine vessels, only one ship had been transmitting tracking data while carrying cigarettes – the Winterfell.

Even then, the Winterfell’s signal went dead not long after leaving the port of Bar with 170 million cigarettes on board. Weeks later it reappeared near the Greek coast, making it impossible to trace its supposed journey to Egypt.

The signal from the ship’s “Automatic identification system” (AIS) is just one of the safety features that help vessels avoid collisions. Although there are legitimate reasons for the ships to go dark, killing the AIS signal is considered a red flag for smuggling.

“Turning AIS on and off is an indicator that would trigger interest in what the vessel is actually doing,” Sarah Bladen of Global Fishing Watch, an international NGO committed to ocean sustainability, told BIRN/ARIJ.

Squalid and dangerous

Four of the nine vessels identified by BIRN are registered as fishing boats, another red flag according to the EU’s anti-corruption office, OLAF.

The RS-300 No. 97 is a fishing boat built in 1977, most likely at the same Russian shipyard as the Zahra.

Sailing from Bar, it was towed to a port in Crete in November 2016 after sustaining mechanical damage, a common theme among the nine ships, which have often required assistance or failed safety inspections.

The Winterfell, built in 1969, was detained by port inspectors for six days in 2013 because an inspection found it unsafe, with bad living and working conditions.

Months later, inspectors found ten further irregularities: a corroded hull, poorly maintained ventilation, pumps and other machine parts, inoperative signals, batteries and switches.

Expired chicken and no pay

Among the worst conditions, however, were those on the Yong Gi ship, sailing under the flag of Sierra Leone, which has made a number of cigarette shipments from Montenegro.

In January 2015 it was stopped by the Greek coastguard as the ship was travelling from Bar to an unnamed destination, according to the sailors.

The crew did not respond to several calls from the local port authority so the local coastguard was sent to intercept it. The ship had sustained “damage to the steering gear”, did not have proper paperwork and was not even properly registered at the time.

Pictures taken by inspectors revealed that sailors were living off expired chicken and out of date yoghurt and sausages, and had not been properly paid.

The ship was released from custody four months later, after extensive repairs and under a new name – Simone. Just a year later, in October 2016, it was seized again by the Greek Coastguard on a journey between Montenegro and North Cyprus on suspicion of cigarette smuggling.

This investigation is produced by BIRN as a part of Paper Trail to Better Governance project.