The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has dropped charges against former employees of the Luxembourg-headquartered Nato Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) who were arrested in May. The NSPA itself had initiated the investigation into alleged procurement corruption that led to the arrests.
But an investigation by journalists at Follow the Money (FTM), French news outlet La Lettre, Belgian daily Le Soir, Deutsche Welle Turkiye, and other media partners, raises several questions about the case.
Among those arrested and placed in custody were US citizen Scott Willason, who served at the Capellen-based Nato agency for around 17 years up until 2018. He and his wife, Albanian influencer Alba Danaj, have since moved to Switzerland, where Willason was apprehended, but still have a business in the Grand Duchy.
Alrescha Luxembourg was registered in 2019 as a consultancy and has filed annual accounts up until 2023, according to the Luxembourg Business Registry.
Nato confirms Luxembourg agency instigated fraud investigation
The other former NSPA employee is İsmail Terlemez, who left Capellen in July 2020 and is the founder of Ankara-based ARCA Defense. According to La Lettre, the company is now Turkey’s second-largest arms exporter. He was arrested at Brussels airport at the same time as Willason.
The indictment against the two men, filed in April, claimed they had a scheme in which “Scott Willason agreed to pay, and Ismail Terlemez agreed to accept, bribes in connection with North Atlantic Treaty Organization contracts.”
Suspicions of political interference
The DOJ motion to dismiss the charges, filed by Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Abigail Slater, stated simply that “The United States has determined, based on careful consideration of the circumstances of this case, that continued prosecution of this case would not serve the interests of justice.”
Slater, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2018 to the National Economic Council with responsibility for technology and telecommunications policy, was also a policy advisor to Vice-President JD Vance during his election campaign in 2024.
The DOJ decision has come under fire from several quarters. Follow the Money cites concerns voiced by French MEP Chloé Ridel (Socialists and Democrats). “All light must be shed on the suspicions of interference by the Trump administration,” she said. “We won’t let it pass.”
The investigative site also quotes an experienced former DOJ official claiming that it is “highly unusual” to drop any case like the NSPA corruption investigation. “Both the motions to dismiss on the same exact day – that would be like lightning striking your house twice in one day,” the official said.
Even more unlikely, charges of paying bribes totalling €130,000 to an unnamed NSPA official, were dismissed against a third suspect, Manousos Bailakis, the chief operating officer for Romanian company Global Defence Logistics.
All three men were set free from prison just days before they were due to be extradited to the United States, according to FTM.
FTM said that the DOJ dismissals “came shortly after US President Donald Trump discussed defence industry cooperation with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the end of June.”
Business in Luxembourg
According to the media reports, Willason was arrested in Lugano, Switzerland, while dropping off one of his children at school.
FTM reported that Willason and Danaj moved to Lugano in Switzerland in 2020, though an article in Paperjam with Danaj about her fashion choices published in December 2021 suggests that the family still had a residence in Luxembourg.
Indeed, it was only in September 2022, according to the business registry, that Alrescha Luxembourg moved to Boulevard Grand-Duchesse Charlotte from an address in Strassen that Willason and Danaj had also registered as their private address. The company moved its headquarters again in April 2025 to an office building in Merl, opposite the Luxembourg City Conservatoire.
According to its latest accounts, filed in October 2024, Alrescha Luxembourg had total assets of close to €624,500 after operating at a loss of almost €240,000 in 2023.
The indictment against the two men allegedly showed that Willason had transferred money from a business he had established in Italy to Alrescha Luxembourg and had then made transfers to his personal bank account.
Alrescha Luxembourg also paid almost €116,000 into Terlemez’s private account, according to the indictment.
Meetings in Luxembourg hotels
According to FTM, Terlemez, then still an NSPA employee, and Willason met separately in Luxembourg hotels with the CEO of Latvian munitions company Vairog, who was seeking to secure NSPA contracts. The suggestion is that Willason told the Latvian CEO that he could secure NSPA contracts even if he increased his prices, and that both could profit from such a deal.
“At no point did the indictment mention that Vairog accepted or showed interest in the offer,” FTM wrote.
Willason’s lawyer in Switzerland has said that the FTM article contained “inaccurate, misleading, and incomplete” information. “What truly matters is that […] all charges and further investigations were immediately dropped and fully closed.”
Nato, via spokesperson Allison Hill, has said that it will not comment on the DOJ dismissals, or on any ongoing investigations. However, she did tell Luxembourg Times that the NSPA had launched its own investigative branch in 2023, building on the 2022 Nato-wide strategy on the prevention, detection and response to fraud and corruption.
“NSPA proactively initiated cooperation with national law enforcement agencies and continues to offer full support to their respective probes of alleged criminal activity by a number of current and former agency personnel,” Hill wrote in an email.
She added that then Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte had instantly granted a request by the Belgian Federal Prosecutor to lift the functional immunity of three former and current NSPA staff on 12 May.
Cummings investigation
NSPA general Stacy Cummings has also been subject to an investigation by Nato following a letter of complaint by the agency’s HR director alleging that she “manipulated investigations” and participated in “irregular” recruitment processes. According to La Lettre, which broke the story, that investigation has also since stalled.
Cummings has denied the allegations. She has received support from a US government employee who is familiar with the work of NSPA and Nato. Granted anonymity, the employee told Luxembourg Times that Cummings had been “at the forefront of going after collusion and fraud in the agency”.
While they could not comment on the allegations made by the HR manager, the source said that a multilateral group of member states had been working with the NSPA general manager on investigations. Cummings had brought in experienced investigators to help create a strategy to detect and address criminal activity, the person said.
Around 75 staff across Nato entities had been involved in dynamic training to detect the red flags of collusion for several months, from late 2023 to spring 2024, the source told Luxembourg Times.
