Ivory Coast: Swiss pilot arrested with nearly $2 million faces justice

On August 8, 2026, customs officers at Abidjan’s Félix-Houphouët-Boigny International Airport found nearly $2 million in undeclared cash in the luggage of David Noël Pérez, a Swiss pilot in his sixties. He had arrived in Ivory Coast a few days earlier aboard a private jet and was preparing to leave on a commercial flight. Detained on September 5, he is being prosecuted for violating regulations governing external financial relations and was due to appear before an investigating judge at the Economic and Financial Criminal Division on October 21. Investigators are seeking to establish who owns the money, where it came from, where it was headed, and how Pérez came into possession of it.