US center to target OC

Published: 09 June 2009

By Beth

US police and prosecutors will be able to use the resources of new US center to fight international organized crime, Attorney General Eric Holder told a justice and home affairs meeting of the G8 in Rome last week. UPI had the story:

The International Organized Crime Intelligence and Operations Center will assemble resources and information of nine U.S. enforcement agencies and prosecutors to combat threats posed by international criminal organizations to U.S. safety and security, Holder said Friday in a news release.

The center will allow partnering agencies to work together in a task force setting, combine data and produce viable leads for investigators and prosecutors to combat international organized crime, he said.

From the press release on the center (known by the acronym IOC-2), it sounds as though the center’s major focus will be on following – and confiscating – the money:

As part of this strategy, IOC-2 will establish a team of financial experts to serve as consultants and identify opportunities and strategies to employ forfeiture as a means of disrupting targeted criminal organizations. The team will coordinate multi-jurisdictional forfeiture strategies and assist agents in the field in obtaining the necessary resources, such as financial auditors, investigators and forfeiture attorneys, to employ the strategy.

The nine participating agencies are listed here. The center is part of the anti-organized crime strategy the Department of Justice outlined last April. No word yet on when the IOC-2 will be up and running.

Serbia prosecutor: Big cases coming

Serbia can soon expect “major and big cases,” the country’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor promised Serbian radio-television B92 last week. A more interesting statement, amid talk from Interior Minister Ivica Dacic about plans to go after corrupt officials, was this from Dacic’s Directorate head Milorad Veljovic (also from B92):

"For me, as the Police Directorate chief, it is most important for the police to enter a showdown with the leaders of organized financial crime. I think this is the greatest evil of the system. It's crime that is not overly visible to the public, but is exceptionally damaging to the state," said he.

And pardon the plug, but the OCCRP/CIN Sarajevo and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ recent stories detailing how higher-ups in Montenegro are implicated in Italian documents on 1990s cigarette smuggling, as well as on the assets of the family of Montenegrin PM Milo Djukanovic were re-covered by ABC News last week.
In other ex-Yugoslav news, monstersandcritics.com (a site devoted to an odd combination of entertainment and world news) reports that criminals who hold dual or triple citizenships in former Yugoslav countries are posing problems for cops and the courts that would like to extradite them. The article mentioned former Bosnian presidency member Ante Jelavic, who’s been living in Croatia since fleeing an abuse of office conviction in 2005, as well as Zagreb-sentenced war criminal Branimir Glavas, who’s been in Bosnia for the past six months, and “disgraced tycoon” Bogoljub Karic, who’s living in Montenegro to avoid embezzlement charges in Serbia.

But all countries in the region are lax in controlling citizenship applications, with bribes known to ease the process further. Criminals can easily obtain the documents they need to then run circles around justice systems.

European diplomats point to this as a reason for the strict entry visa regime for Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins and Macedonians.

Today, borders in former Yugoslavia only hamper police, 'while never, even in the blackest days of war, posing an obstacle to criminals,' a former Croatian criminal division police chief, Hajrudin Omerovic, said.

EU ignoring eastern gas corruption

The EU is sending a “fact-finding” mission to Ukraine this week to see whether there’ll be another gas crisis in the coming winter, but the EU Observer writes that the Union is not interested in battling the corruption endemic to the eastern European gas trade.

Ukraine promised to clean up its natural gas industry in March in return for investment from the EU and other Western partners. The deal prompted Russia to announce it would “review” its relationship with the EU if Russia were sidelined from the discussions. (Some 80 percent of the EU’s natural gas transits through Ukraine from Russia; a Kiev-Moscow row over prices last winter prompted Russia to shut off the taps, leaving various European countries gasless for two weeks.) The EU Observer has more details:

Mr Putin and Ukraine Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko are at the same time trying to strong-arm Ukraine gas tycoon Dmitry Firtash, in developments which highlight the links between politics, gas and organised crime in the region.

A Putin-Tymoshenko deal in January ended the role of RosUkrEnergo (RUE), in which Mr Firtash controls a 50 percent stake, in selling Turkmenistan gas to Ukraine. Naftogaz in March also seized €3 billion of RUE gas stocks.

A little-known, Swiss-based firm called RosGas in May took ownership of Mr Firtash's Hungarian gas supply company, Emfesz, in a transaction that Mr Firtash has called "illegal" and is fighting in the Swiss courts. It is unclear who owns RosGas. But Emfesz has said it belongs to the Putin-controlled Russian firm Gazprom.
The events have already affected European interests. RUE's problems have seen it cut deliveries to EU states Poland and Hungary. The Emfesz takeover means 20 percent of Hungary's gas supply is now in unknown hands.

But the Observer goes on to say that the shake-up could be rooted in Russia’s arrest of alleged mafia boss Semyon Mogilevich for tax evasion last year. The US Department of Justice and other agencies reckon that Mogilevich is a major corrupting player in the natural gas markets of the former Soviet Union.

Mr Mogilevich is connected to big names in the gas trade. In one example, his lawyer and ex-wife were involved in two Firtash companies. Mogilevich associates have also worked with Oleg Palchykov, a friend of Mr Firtash and a former co-director of RUE together with Konstantin Chuichenko, now a senior aide of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

Analysts, such as Roman Kupchinsky from the US-based NGO Jamestown, believe that Mr Mogilevich helped Mr Firtash get started in the gas trade and used to give him protection. One way of looking at the Russia-Ukraine gas wars is not in terms of international commerce or geopolitics, but of one criminal clan muscling in on its rival.

According to the article, the EU mission is not going to be asking questions about the takeover of Emfesz, nor has the European Commission taken concrete steps toward forcing energy companies active in the EU to disclose their ownership structures and payments to governments.

Meanwhile, the Moscow court that is trying Mogilevich and cosmetics tycoon Vladimir Nekrasov for tax evasion decided to return the case to the prosecutor’s office to “remedy violations.” Itar-Tass had no further details. Last week, Mogilevich and Nekrasov had pleaded not guilty to the charges, and the court closed the trial to the public. The closure “smacks of a massive cover-up by Russian officials of their illicit deals,” wrote the Jamestown Foundation’s Roman Kupchinsky in this analysis.

Mogilevich is also wanted by the FBI for racketeering, various frauds and money laundering.

The news last week was Russia-rich. The New York Times profiled Sergei Kanev, the disco DJ turned Novaya Gazeta freelancer who recently suffered an attempted strangulation by wire, presumably for his articles on police corruption and organized crime. One of his colleagues offers a hard-eyed assessment of working in Russia:

“The most dangerous thing right now is not to criticize the authorities,” said Yulia Latynina, a columnist at the newspaper. “It’s to criticize people who can kill you. The people Kanev writes about can kill. That is his problem.”

And finally, another middleman scam has struck the US, centered in the town of Avon, CO. – close to the tony ski town of Vail. Police said crooks from Russia and a few Eastern European countries created bogus companies that advertised legitimate-looking job openings online. The new American hires were tasked to receive large amounts of money in their bank accounts, and then wire the money on to overseas accounts. The FBI is investigating.