Investigators at the UK’s Serious Fraud Office conducted a dawn raid in connection with an ongoing investigation into the sale of fake airline spare parts that has led to the grounding of planes worldwide.
The SFO said that it took one suspect into custody as part of the raid on Wednesday – believed to Jose Alejandro Zamora Yrala, the director of London-based AOG Technics Ltd, which is at the centre of the scandal.
AOG specialised in selling parts for the ‘best-selling passenger aircraft engine’ in the world – the CFM56 which powers many single-aisle Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 aircraft. The company also sold parts for the world’s most-used cargo aircraft engine since 2015.
During those years, those spare parts have made their way into some of the engines used by every major US airline, as well as dozens of other carriers around the world.
In some cases, the dodgy spare parts have been even harder to detect because they made their way into engines through innocent third-party suppliers. Europe’s biggest low-cost airline, Ryanair, is just one carrier which has identified AOG parts this way.
Since the scandal first came to light, safety officials in the United States and Europe have continued to manage the safety fallout, issuing a number of alerts and grounding planes that may have used parts supplied by AOG.
“This investigation deals with very serious allegations of fraud involving the supply of aircraft parts, the consequences of which are potentially far-reaching,” commented Nick Ephgrave, the director of the Serious Fraud Office, after the arrest was announced on Wednesday.
“The SFO is best placed to take this investigation forward vigorously and we are determined to establish the facts as swiftly as possible,” Ephgrave continued.
AOG is understood to have used falsely certified parts with forged documents to convince airlines and third-party suppliers of their legitimacy. The parts may have been older than advertised, second hand, or their provenance might be fake.
Airlines continue to conduct urgent inspections to ensure that their aircraft engines don’t have AOG-supplied parts inside and are swapping out parts as required.
