EXCLUSIVE: Founder of firm accused of selling bogus aircraft parts used by American airlines, forcing dozens of planes to be grounded, is one-time DJ from Venezuela who recently married wife at wedding in Mallorca – where they wore matching Rolexes

The founder of a company accused of selling fake jet engine parts used in planes around the world is a Venezuelan former techno DJ who recently married his wife in a luxury wedding in Mallorca.

Jose Alejandro Zamora Yrala, 35, is the founder of AOG Technics, a London-based company that allegedly supplied parts from forged paperwork that ended up in at least 126 commercial aircraft engines around the world.

Leading US airlines, including Delta and United, have been forced to ground planes affected by the scandal and a global investigation is underway to identify other planes fitted with the suspect parts. Planes in Europe, Australia and China were also affected.

Photos uncovered by DailyMail.com from Yrala’s wedding to his wife, Sarah Leddin (33), in April last year, provide the first glimpse of the elusive businessman since the scandal broke.

Yrala and Leddin tied the knot in April last year at an exclusive resort on the Spanish island of Mallorca, in the Mediterranean Sea. The couple reportedly wore matching Rolex watches to the wedding, which was joined by dozens of family members from both Venezuela and Ireland, where Leddin is from.

Before joining the aviation industry around 2010, Yrala was a budding techno DJ and music producer performing under the moniker Santa Militia.

A profile on artist website Resident Advisor says Yrala started playing techno events in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, in 2005 before moving to Europe in 2010 and performing in countries such as Spain, Italy and the UK.

He is now at the heart of one of the aviation industry’s biggest scandals in recent years.

AOG Technics, which was founded in the UK in 2015, allegedly supplied thousands of parts with fake paperwork to other companies that airlines use for aircraft maintenance.

AOG Technics is believed to have invented employees with fake profiles to boost its image and also rented ‘virtual’ offices near Buckingham Palace to give it an exclusive address.

The parts were used in CFM56 engines, the world’s best-selling jet engine, used in aircraft including Airbus A320 models and the Boeing 737.

CFM International has now sued AOG in a London court. Yrala has not commented publicly on the scandal and his location is not known.

His wife told Bloombergwho first reported on the scandal, that the outlet is “trying to paint him as some bad person or something.”

“He doesn’t want to talk to anyone because the information is fabricated at best,” she said.

Yrala began his career in the aerospace industry in 2010, when he joined an aircraft engine maintenance firm, AJW, Bloomberg reported. He later joined the UK branch of GA Telesis LLC, a Florida-based aerospace firm, before founding AOG in 2015.

Bloomberg cited a person familiar with his routine as saying Yrala usually works from home using a platform that connects buyers and sellers of aircraft parts.

UK company filings signed by Yrala show AOG Technics had around $3 million in assets in 2022, indicating the size of the operation.

CFM, the company whose engines were affected by the scandal, said there were no reports of counterfeit parts being used. Instead, the issue centers on thousands of parts with allegedly false documentation. Some went unnoticed for years.

AOG is accused of selling some of the used parts as brand new, making a huge profit, while threatening the safety of passengers on jets equipped with affected engines.

In one case, paperwork accompanying the sale of a key component called a low-pressure turbine to a Florida company in 2019 was signed by a man named ‘Geoffrey Chirac’, believed to be a non-existent employee of AOG Technics .

According to CFM court documents, the alarm was first raised on June 21 when TAP Air Portugal’s maintenance arm said it was concerned about the documentation for a small part called a damper it had obtained from AOG Technics.

“The part appears to be older than represented,” CFM said.

The birth certificate that must accompany every aviation part contained a fake signature, it said in a court filing detailing the scope of the sting operation.

According to CFM, the same airline found 24 forms from the same vendor within 20 days with ‘significant differences’.

AOG told a British court last month that it was “fully co-operating” with investigations without commenting on CFM’s claims.

LinkedIn profiles for staff who allegedly worked at AOG Technics include stock images that appear elsewhere on the Internet, including in promotional materials for other business. Many of the LinkedIn accounts have now been deleted.

One profile was for a man named Ray Kwong, who was listed as the company’s head of trading. Kwong listed previous experience at Mitsubishi and Nissan, but neither could confirm that he had been employed by them.

His photo shows a gray-haired man in a smart shirt with a striped blue tie. The same image also appears on other web pages – including one for a textile company that claims the man is a ‘factory owner’ named Wang.

Another employee is listed on LinkedIn as Martina Spencer, believed to be an account manager for AOG Technics. Her photo appears to be another stock photo of a woman whose image was also used in an Amazon listing for women’s reading glasses.

The company has also boosted its image by operating a ‘virtual’ office in central London, just a few minutes’ walk from Buckingham Palace.

UK business records reveal the company’s first official address was a small house in the coastal town of Hove, in southern England. It then occupied a second residential building in Hove before moving to London in 2017 and eventually settling at The Nova building.

While developers of aircraft parts are strictly regulated, and separate approval is needed to manufacture them, no formal permission is needed to set up warehouses to distribute them.

The scandal raises serious questions about operating procedures designed to prevent unapproved parts from entering planes.

Phil Seymour, president of UK-based aviation consultancy IBA, said: ‘This is not a new issue in the industry. There have always been people who wanted to make money from aircraft parts.

‘The big problem here is that these parts have found their way into engines; it’s the game changer for me.’