It all began as a routine piece of paperwork. On January 17, 2025, Madagascar’s Civil Aviation Authority (ACM) issued a provisional registration certificate to a company called UDAAN Aviation for five Boeing 777-200ER aircraft, officially in transit to Kenya for maintenance work. At first glance, nothing set this procedure apart from the hundreds of others handled by Malagasy aviation authorities each year. Yet it was the starting point of an international scandal that would badly dent the credibility of an entire sector.
In reality, the five aircraft never touched down on Malagasy soil once, even though regulations required it. Instead, they transited through Cambodia before reaching Iran on July 15, 2025, where they were folded straight into the fleet of Mahan Air, an Iranian carrier under U.S. sanctions over its alleged ties to the Revolutionary Guards. The first warning came from Phnom Penh: as early as June 20, Cambodian authorities flagged suspicious documents concerning three of the five planes to the ACM. It would take until July 22, however, and a report from the specialist outlet Aviation Journal, for the affair to break into the open. The ACM only issued a public statement three days later.
The investigation that followed uncovered a fraud mechanism of striking simplicity. The registration certificate, meant to carry a limited validity period, had reportedly been extended without authorization until July 12, allowing the aircraft to keep flying under the Malagasy flag well past the legal expiry of their rights. Documents are also said to have been falsified once the planes were abroad. Two individuals have been formally implicated: Malagasy national Heriniaina Rijasoa Andriamananarivo and Indian national Singh Khushwinder, both suspected of manipulating documentation to enable the unauthorized deployment. At the center of the scheme sat a shell company, UDAAN Potentials Ltd, which appears to have served as an opaque go-between linking the aircraft’s real owners to the Malagasy administration.
The political fallout was swift. Valéry Ramonjavelo, the transport minister in office at the time, was removed from government, though that has done little to quiet questions about possible complicity higher up within Madagascar’s regulatory apparatus. Given the scale of the case and its sensitive diplomatic dimension, Prime Minister Christian Ntsay announced that he had personally requested the FBI’s expertise to help shed full light on the matter. It was no small gesture: Madagascar’s reputation is on the line at a moment of already strained trade relations with Washington, after the United States imposed 47 percent tariffs on Malagasy exports in April 2025, putting at risk the country’s access to the AGOA program on which more than 400,000 textile-sector jobs depend.
The trial that followed opened before Malagasy courts, bringing together dozens of defendants, both Malagasy and foreign, called to answer for their alleged roles in this disguised delivery. But beyond the individuals now facing prosecution, the case keeps raising a central question that remains unanswered: how did five commercial airliners manage to change continents three times over, right under the nose of an administration meant to track them, without a single alarm going off before Cambodian authorities happened, almost by chance, to step in?