Former Cocaine Kingpin Reinvents Himself as Dubai Businessman

The drug trafficker grew up in Borgerhout, in a family of four brothers and three sisters. For him, going to school was a waste of time. His only ambition was to become a millionaire, he admitted to his teachers at the SISO 2 school in Deurne. The young man began selling drugs for a local gang leader, before being entrusted with the task of recovering drug shipments. On the night of April 21 to 22, 2011, he was arrested in flagrante delicto with Ibrahim E.M, his right-hand man, in the port area. A third suspect had managed to escape. Found guilty, Othman and Ibrahim were sentenced in 2013 to two years’ probation for organizing a criminal gang.

Since then, Othman El Ballouti has disappeared from the radar. According to security sources, he was living in Morocco, but in reality he was already residing in Dubai where he was the manager of the company OEB International, specializing in the trade of luxury watches, particularly Rolex and Richard Mille brands. According to the Antwerp police, the thirty-year-old is "the most fascinating Antwerp drug trafficker", in reference to his immense fortune accumulated through international cocaine trafficking. The criminal had the ingenious idea, as a "recovery agent" of drugs, to be paid in kind, that is to say in cocaine blocks that he resold at the time for 30,000 euros per kilo block on the wholesale market.

According to his friends at the time, Othman liked to work with a small group of trusted people and with few intermediaries, which did not allow the police to identify the members of his network and intercept his shipments. "Othman had a reputation for not wanting to spend a euro too much," some sources confide, going so far as to call him "miserly" and "stingy". Farhan Bouzambou, brother of Latifa, Othman’s ex-wife, and Younes, his younger brother, were arrested in the case of Dutch presenter Frank Masmeijer, accused of trafficking 500 kilos of cocaine. But no trail leads to Othman, who remains untraceable.