Italy’s lower house has rubber-stamped a bill forwarded by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government that would give immunity from prosecution to top public officials – including the prime minister, who is facing yet another corruption charge in the courts.
The bill is expected to pass the upper house in September. The BBC quoted opposition leader Walter Veltroni as saying the law was, “Objectively speaking, a law for a single person.”
Berlusconi is involved in a Milan court case having to do with payoffs to his British lawyer David Mills. He is also being prosecuted in Rome for alleged collusion between his Mediaset network and the state broadcaster Rai. He claims that the 2,500 court hearings he’s been through -- by his own count -- are the result of the Italian judiciary’s politically motivated witch-hunts.
If we give Berlusconi the benefit of the doubt on that, it appears that Italy’s legislative branch is more than making up for the judiciary’s persecution of the 71-year-old prime minister. Another so-called “Berlusconi bill” that would freeze all trials for alleged crimes committed before 2002 is making its way through parliament. If it passes it would freeze the Berlusconi-Mills corruption case.
New cases, like the one that may involve a former finance minister arrested July 14, will not be affected. Ottaviano del Turco, the former minister now governor of the central Abruzzo region, and several senior officials were arrested on suspicion of corruption. They and around 25 others are being investigated for their alleged involvement in a €12.8-million fraud in the financing of the public health system but have not been charged.
Turco, interestingly enough, is no ally of Berlusconi’s, having served as finance minister from 2000 to 2001 in Guiliano Amato’s center-left government. He also chaired parliament’s anti-Mafia committee in the late 1990s.
Israelis dig deeper into Olmert
Other countries don’t roll over when it comes to possible prime ministerial corruption. Israeli investigators are just not letting up on PM Ehud Olmert. The New York Times last week reported:
Israeli prosecutors announced an expansion of their corruption investigation into Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Friday, saying they suspected he fraudulently billed multiple state agencies for the same flights when he was mayor of Jerusalem and trade minister and used the extra money for personal trips and vacations.
In a statement issued after questioning Mr. Olmert for two hours, the police and the Justice Ministry said that the travel agency he used colluded in the scheme by sending copies of the same bill to numerous public bodies and booking Olmert family vacations with the profits.
A Justice Ministry spokesman added that the state agencies involved in the double billing included those focused on helping soldiers, mentally disabled children, the disabled and the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem. He said Mr. Olmert would speak on their behalf during his trips and then ask them to pay for the fare.
Next week, Mr. Olmert’s lawyers will cross-examine a Long Island businessman who told prosecutors in public testimony in May that he had delivered about $150,000 in cash to Mr. Olmert in envelopes over a number of years before Mr. Olmert became prime minister. The businessman, Morris Talansky, said he never asked anything of Mr. Olmert in exchange, but the police have several letters of introduction from Mr. Olmert for Mr. Talansky to businessmen and officials of other governments that they believe amounted to a quid pro quo.
Judicial authorities said that between Mr. Talansky’s envelopes and the travel agency’s multiple billings, Mr. Olmert had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in about 15 years. He served as mayor for a decade until 2003, and then as a government minister until succeeding Ariel Sharon in early 2006.
Olmert called the charity-bilking allegations “despicable.”
Ukraine embassy worker detained for uranium
A worker at the Ukrainian embassy in Germany was arrested last week on charges of smuggling radioactive materials after being caught with $4.9 million worth of radioactive materials in the Ukrainian town of Cherkassy.
The man, who wasn’t named by the media, along with the security manager of a local bank, were reportedly arrested with various amounts of cesium and uranium in their car. Reports said the two men had stolen the hot stuff from a holding site in Kiev and were planning to sell it to an organized crime group.
This news received fairly limited attention, considering that it’s part of the “loose nukes” scenario in which badly guarded radioactive material in the former USSR is swiped and sold to terrorists to make dirty bombs – or in this case, sold to an organized crime group who may then sell it to the highest bidder. Various media have covered the nightmare scenario, for example, here, here and here.
Film helps net felon
“Gomorra,” the Italian bestseller-turned-blockbuster, has exposed more than just the workings of the Napolitan mafia, the Camorra. When the film was shown at a Naples area prison to a group of inmates (all in jail because of Camorra-related crimes), the cons recognized one of their own in the film.
The actor, credited in the film as Giovanno Venosa, who is reported to be a wanted organized crime figure with a passion for acting, ended up as part of the no-name cast that director Matteo Garrone selected for the film. He tried out in an open audition and won a role. Police said they easily tracked him down and that he was placed in prison in the northern Italian city of Modena, near Bologna.
"We would have never known Venosa was who we were looking for if he had not been recognized by the inmates who saw the film," a spokesman for the Carabinieri in Naples said in a telephone interview.
In other Camorra news, Naples police last week arrested 44 suspected mobsters in a crackdown on drug trafficking, after a convicted Camorra boss was captured earlier this year. The group controls drugs and arms trafficking around Naples, as well as running extortion and prostitution rackets, and police said they confiscated $480 million worth of apartments, cars, motorcycles, land and companies in last week’s raid.
Bulgaria Justice Minister: No progress on organized crime, corruption
It’s a sad day when a country’s own justice minister has to admit that her country has done nothing to get rid of a scourge that is blackening its reputation in European circles, but that’s what Bulgarian Justice Minister Miglena Tacheva admitted last week.
“There are spheres in which we haven’t made actual progress, such as the fight against corruption and organized crime,” she said after meeting with Bulgarian members of the European Parliament, reported the Sofia-based agency Novinite.
The European Commission is due to report July 23 on whether Bulgaria is up to snuff on reforms it promised to make when the country joined the European Union (EU) in January 2007. The country’s judiciary and other institutions have been under fire for months for their inability to take on rampant organized crime and corruption in one of the EU’s newest members.
Whether one of Bulgaria’s most recent measures – shutting down its duty-free shops – will impress the Commission is still up in the air. The stores were to close last week after the Commission criticized Bulgaria for not making any progress in either corruption or organized crime, and noted that the shops near the non-EU borders were hotbeds of mafia activities.
Meanwhile, the former head of the EU funds directorate at Bulgaria’s National Road Infrastructure Fund pled guilty last week to charges of soliciting a bribe, but denied that he planned to in turn use the money to bribe another colleague to influence the re-zoning of some land, reported the Sofia Echo.
Grisly finds shatter Mexico’s relative calm
The findings of nearly one dozen bodies ended more than two months of a near-lull in the drug wars in the Mexican border town of Tijuana last week.
What the police found was foul, reported the LA Times:
The weekend's slayings bore many hallmarks of organized crime hits. The six men found early Monday had been shot execution-style. Their bodies had been doused with gasoline and set ablaze; some of the victims were partially burned. On Saturday night, three men were found fatally shot in an SUV. The body of a man discovered Monday in the Tijuana River bore signs of torture and was wrapped in a carpet.
Other victims’ heads had been wrapped in plastic; the corpse of one woman was found stuffed in a barrel. The press reported that it had been 10 weeks since rival factions of the Arellano Felix drug cartel had a shootout in Tijuana that left 13 dead, and papers speculated that these latest murders could be more of the same. More gory details can be found here.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon sent the military to Mexico’s border towns in January 2007 to beat down the organized crime groups running the drugs trade. Though some 3,000 soldiers are involved, the death toll in Mexico from the related violence this year – 2,000 and counting – is already higher than it was for the first six months of last year, when some 1,400 people had been killed.
Berlusconi immunity bill passed
Published: 16 July 2008
By Beth
