Former bulgarian OC official sentenced

One of Bulgaria’s former top crime busters received an 18-month suspended sentence Thursday after being found guilty of abuse of office and of creating a document with false information. Ivan Ivanov, the former deputy head of the Bulgarian Interior Ministry’s organized crime department, also faces charges of leaking secrets to individuals under Interior Ministry investigation.

Ivanov’s arrest in March opened a scandal in the Ministry that ended with the resignation of Interior Minister Rumen Petkov in April. Petkov had admitted having contact with key suspects in several police investigations. Other heads that had rolled included that of the country’s deputy interior minister. The scandal kept the European Union from ignoring Bulgaria’s do-nothing approach to organized crime; the Union later froze hundreds of millions of euros in aid to the country.

Romania indicts officials on corruption charges

Eight Romanian football officials and players’ agents were indicted last week on charges of tax evasion and fraud over the foreign transfers of 12 Romanian footballers to half a dozen countries.

Former Romania international Gheorghe Popescu, who also used to be a player agent, will be tried for irregularities over striker Florin Bratu's move from Rapid Bucharest to Galatasaray in 2003.

Prosecutors say Rapid received $1.6 million less than they were supposed to for the transfer and they accuse Popescu and two other agents, Victor and Ioan Becali, of pocketing that money.

This cost the state $1.5 million and it cost four first division clubs at more than $10 million, according to Romanian prosecutors. The case marks the first time that Romania’s post-communist authorities have looked into football fraud, though the media in that country have been reporting on it for nearly 20 years.

Serbian mayor arrested

The mayor of a northern Serbian town was arrested Tuesday along with 11 people that police said were involved in the “construction mafia” in and around the booming northern town of Zrenjanin.

Mayor Goran  Knezevic, the municipal urban planning chief, the head of a Novi Sad-based construction company and others are suspected of illegally rigging construction tenders, illegally expropriating land, embezzling €3.5 million in municipal funds, and of accepting and offering bribes. Knezevic and others were questioned throughout the week; prosecutors want the suspects to remain in custody, citing the potential for the suspects’ flight and ability to tamper with witnesses.

Serbian President Boris Tadic announced earlier this year that the government and his Democratic Party would launch several operations to fight corruption in Serbia.

Serbian Interior Minister Ivica Dacic last week signed a trilateral agreement to cooperate in fighting organized crime with his Bulgarian and Romanian counterparts. Dacic said the agreement would first address the cigarette and drug smuggling over the Bulgaria-Serbia border.

Bulgaria's Interior Minister (Mihail Mikov) declined to comment in detail on yesterday's reports in the Serbian media that the Bulgarian and Italian mafias had taken over in Serbia, and were even more powerful there than the Serbian mafia.

Mikov did point out, however, that there were certain Bulgarian crime bosses, who operated in other Balkans states, and that the Bulgarian courts and prosecution were aware of who these were.
 
Given that Bulgaria’s do-nothing courts and prosecution were the focus of EC disapproval in the summer, and that they were part of the reason the EC froze aid money to the country, the Bulgarians being “aware” is probably as good as Bulgaria’s neighbors are going to get.   

Southern Italy sees demonstrations, troop deployment

More than 10,000 people turned out to protest anti-immigrant racism and the Camorra mafia in the Caserta area near Naples on Saturday morning, just two weeks after mob gunmen killed six African immigrants for supposedly dealing drugs on their own without a mafia middleman.

At the same time, the 500 troops that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi promised for the region arrived over the weekend, reports AFP.

Paratroopers armed with assault rifles patrolled a mafia stronghold in southern Italy on Saturday in a government show of force following mafia-linked bloodshed last month. About 500 soldiers manned checkpoints and searched cars for weapons in the area in and around the town of Caserta, near Naples…

The troops joined 400 police reinforcements who were sent to the region on September 22, four days after the shootings which claimed the lives of an Italian owner of a recreation hall along with three Ghanaians, two Liberians and a Togolese.

Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said Friday the troops would remain in the region until the end of the year but could stay longer if needed. "We want the criminals -- those who prefer that people hear the bursts of Kalashnikov fire -- to hear the voice of the state," he said. The soldiers would man checkpoints, conduct weapons searches, protect "at-risk" shops and monitor suspects under house arrest, Maroni said.

Berlusconi defended the troop deployment last week, telling the press, “The state will intervene with its strength and authority to defend the rights of citizens.” (In other Berlusconi news, a judge in Milan, where Berlusconi faces corruption charges, moved Saturday to ask Italy’s Constitutional Court whether a new Italian law that would give the country’s top officials immunity from prosecution was constitutional. Berlusconi has been charged in Milan with paying his British lawyer $600,000 to withhold incriminating details of his business dealings.) But should the public think that Berlusconi’s anti-crime strategy will focus only on the brute force of the military and police, Interior Minister Roberto Maroni last week promised an ever-stronger attack on mafia assets.

A thorough Q&A on the military deployment and what it might mean for Italy can be found here.

EC fines ‘paraffin mafia’

The European Commission fined nine companies a total of €676 million (US$948 million) for operating what it called a price-fixing “paraffin mafia” for 13 years. It was the fourth-largest fine ever imposed by the EC on any industrial sector in Europe.

Prostitution and gambling it may not be, and it would certainly wouldn’t make an exciting film, but paraffin wax is an petrochemical product used to make everyday items that everyone uses, such as paper cups, candles and tires, so if a cartel is controlling the prices that’s hardly good. EU news clearinghouse EurActiv has the story.

The companies involved in the cartel, dubbed the 'paraffin mafia', exchanged sensitive commercial information and essentially manipulated European markets for paraffin wax between 1992 and 2005, according to the Commission. Meetings were regularly held in top hotels across Europe.

"There is probably not a household or company in Europe that has not bought products affected by this 'paraffin mafia' cartel," said EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, referring to a market valued at nearly €500 million per year.

ExxonMobile, Hungary’s MOL, France’s Total and Germany’s Sasol were among the firms slappedby the EC. Oil giant Shell, another member of the cartel, would have faced a €96 million fine but agreed to cooperate with investigators, allowing it to escape a fine.

Olmert questioned for eighth time in corruption probe

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert faced police questioning for the eighth time since May regarding one of the several corruption investigations into Olmert, who resigned from his post last month.

The probe -- one of several concerning Olmert -- involves allegations that as trade minister he steered tens of millions of dollars worth of state funds towards a company owned by his former law partner Uri Messer. It is one of several criminal investigations into Olmert, who resigned on September 21 to battle the charges amid a growing chorus of criticism from political allies and foes alike.

All the allegations concern his dealings as Jerusalem mayor and trade minister in the 13 years before he assumed the premiership in 2006. He will continue to serve as interim prime minister until Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni forms a new governing coalition or the country holds snap elections -- a period of political limbo that could last weeks or months.

Police have recommended that the 63-year-old Olmert be indicted on criminal charges in two cases where he is accused of illegally accepting large sums of cash from a US financier and multiple-billing foreign trips. Olmert has denied any wrongdoing.

Coast Guard finds cocaine in Panamanian ship

A US Coast Guard detachment raided a Panamanian ship in the Caribbean recently and found nearly 2,000 kilos of cocaine hidden onboard before arresting the 10-man crew of nationals of Costa Rica, Ecuador, India, Nicaragua and Spain.

As I’ve mentioned before, Coast Guard law enforcement teams have been raiding suspect ships in south-of-the-border waters on attachment either to US Navy ships or the navy ships of other nations. It’s all part of the Caribbean Corridor Initiative (CCI), a project that investigates South American drug cartels’ use of the Caribbean to move cocaine north, to the noses of Americans and Canadians. This recent news piqued my interest, having just returned from one of the countries The Economist listed last spring as a major casualty of the exploding drug trafficking in the region: Trinidad and Tobago, which has a worse murder rate (30.6 per 100,000 in 2007) than Russia and Haiti put together.

The main force driving the high rates of crime and violence in the Caribbean is the impact of intra-regional drug trafficking. The explosion of the international drug trade has institutionalised criminal behaviour, increased property-related crime by drug users and underpinned a steady increase in the availability of firearms.

Geographically, the region is vulnerable because of its location at a crossroads between steady streams of illegal narcotics (flowing north from the world's main source of cocaine—the Andean region—to the drugs' main consumer markets, the US and Europe) and guns (flowing south mainly from the US to South America).

Adding to the challenge, Caribbean countries have expansive coastlines and vast territorial waters to patrol and lack adequate law enforcement. The result is huge flows of drugs through the region. Drug proceeds are often used to buy illegal arms and put sophisticated arsenals in the hands of competing gangs, in turn fuelling the murder rate and driving a wave of kidnappings and extortion.

According to a report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), around 216 tonnes of cocaine pass through the Caribbean and the Guianas (Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana) every year en route to the US and Europe, accounting for one-half of the US's cocaine imports and one-half of Europe's. This figure is set to rise further—recent crackdowns on Central American drug-smuggling routes have begun to shift more supply to the Caribbean basin.

The CCI’s cooperation among the FBI, the USCG and other countries in the region seems to be at least on the right track in fighting the scourge that’s turning these tropical countries into abattoirs.

Unfortunately, at the same time, the drug-war violence in a country even closer to the US – our southern neighbor Mexico – doesn’t look to be abating any time soon, and some are voicing fears that the violence could spread north.

Since early last year, Mexican President Felipe Calderón has deployed thousands of soldiers and federal police to drug-route battlegrounds such as Baja California, Chihuahua and Michoacan. Experts say it's clear that the recent bloodbath along the border, felt especially hard in Ciudad Juarez and Nuevo Laredo and now increasingly in Tijuana, is the backlash.

In the United States, there's a growing unease about the potential for spillover. Some sectors of the border-region economy have already suffered severe losses as a result of the violence, and others may follow.

“The Mexican government has said that their strategy is to attack the cartels and break them down to a more manageable size,” said political scientist David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego. “The problem with breaking cartels up into smaller, supposedly more manageable pieces is that it becomes disorganized crime. You start to have people who are broken off, fractionalized, fighting among each other.”

This destabilization has played out in Tijuana recently in a terrifying string of slayings. On Monday, 12 bodies were dumped outside an elementary school, some with their tongues cut out. A note left with them referred to “blabbermouths” and the Arellano Félix cartel.

The carnage continued yesterday. Authorities said the bodies of 10 men had been found between midnight and noon in neighborhoods around the city. The dead included two men who had been decapitated. Five were found in a sport utility vehicle that had been reported stolen last week in California.

More than 400 homicides have been recorded this year in Tijuana, which has an estimated population of 1.5 million. The majority of them were drug-related, Mexican authorities say. There were 337 killings citywide in 2007. By comparison, New Orleans, one of the most violent U.S. cities, which is less than one-fifth the size of Tijuana with about 240,000 people, had 209 homicides in 2007.