“There is no point talking about prices right now because we need to check the condition of each tank and what needs to be updated,” he said. Versluys denied that the Belgian government had approached him, and said it was hard to estimate the price for which he would sell the tanks. “The talks are still on, but I’m not going to pay half a million for a tank that’s nowhere near combat-ready,” Dedonder told Belgian media. Ludivine Dedonder, Belgium’s minister of defence, last week said it had opened talks with OIP but accused the firm of trying to make a “huge profit” from the sale. ‘We are open to all options, but the price has to be fair,’ Versluys says. Belgium, which has no tanks left in its defence stock, has explored the possibility of buying back the Leopard 1s it sold to Versluys. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the subsequent unprecedented western military support to Kyiv, had already led Versluys to sell 46 M113 light armoured vehicles to the UK, which then transferred them to Ukraine as part of a military package. But the chancellor Olaf Scholz’s decision last week on the Leopard 2s, which opened the floodgates for other European countries to follow suit, has opened up new possibilities. The Leopard 1, which is from the 1960s, is lighter and less powerful than the newer Leopard 2 tanks, 14 of which Germany agreed last week to send to Ukraine, but German officials have said they would still be able to compete with a Russian battle tank.įor years, Versluys was unable to sell the Leopard 1s and Gepards as German law requires approval from Berlin for the re-export of its military equipment. “But buying those decommissioned tanks was a massive gamble for us.

“It was the market price because of the geopolitical situation at the time,” he said. In one of Versluys’s bigger deals, he bought 50 Leopard 1 tanks that the Belgian government decommissioned in 2014 for €37,000 each (about £29,600).

The defence cuts were accelerated by the 2008 economic crisis, and by 2014, the year Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, European military spending had reached a historic low. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, European nations have sought to replace some of the heavy and costly-to-maintain cold war-era tanks with the lighter vehicles needed for shorter peacekeeping missions around the world. Versluys bought up most of his current stock over the last two decades, acquiring the tanks directly from European governments cutting their defence spending. Walking Tournai’s narrow, cobblestoned back streets and boulevards, it is hard to imagine that such weapons are only a 15-minute walk away. Austrian-flagged hardware in the OIP hangar.

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