Ingush official assassinated

Published: 17 June 2009

The attack injured at least five other people. VOA puts the murder into context: Gazgireeva's death comes 18 months after her predecessor on the court was also shot. On Friday, the Interior Minister of neighboring Dagestan was gunned down by a sniper during a wedding. On Tuesday, two Dagestani police officers were killed in separate incidents just hours after Russian President Dmitri Medvedev visited the republic in response to growing violence in the Caucasus.

By Beth

The deputy head of Ingushetia’s Supreme Court was shot dead last week, the latest in a spate of assassinations in Russia’s Caucasus region. Gunmen opened fire on Aza Gazgireeva’s chauffeured van in Nazran, the Russian republic’s largest city, according to Voice of America. Russian television reported that a gunman then walked up to Gazgireeva’s body and shot her in the head.
He traveled with his entire National Security Council. The Russian leader says problems in the Caucasus region are systemic. An analyst told VOA that Russia will have to establish the rule of law, root out corruption and create jobs if the Caucasus is to ever be stable, but acknowledged that Russia so far appears unwilling or unable to do any of those things. 

In other Russia news, the Moscow Times reports that Canada has denied a prominent Federation Council senator a visa for more than 10 years, as the country claims the billionaire senator has links to organized crime.

Court documents show that Canada is using the questionable past of Vitaly Malkin – Russia’s 85th richest man, according to Forbes – to deny him entry.  A visa officer told the court that Malkin was a shareholder in a company thought to have received money diverted from a debt-reduction deal with Angola. "Mr. Malkin is reported to have personally received some $48 million in the transaction," a passage published by the court in May reads.

The visa officer also noted Malkin's association with individuals involved in money laundering, arms trade and trade in Angolan "conflict diamonds," the documents say.

Malkin's involvement in President Boris "Yeltsin's re-election campaign is also discussed, with the officer stating that Mr. Malkin had used profits from organized crime to subvert the democratic process in Russia," they say.

Malkin has vehemently denied the charges and complained that they might hurt his reputation as a senator, according to the documents.  In more news out of Canada news, the RCMP announced last week that law enforcement across the country will have the technology to access Interpol’s criminal databases, making Canada one of the first countries to be able to do so.

Police forces and law enforcement agencies  will be able to instantly search INTERPOL databases, which include 173,000 names of wanted international fugitives or persons of interest and more than 18 million stolen or lost travel documents, of which over 10 million are passports.

Bulgaria: New party rising?

Recent European Parliament elections have shown that Bulgarians support the opposition center-right party, Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria (GERB), which may do more than the current Socialist-led government to get rid of organized crime and corruption, writes local daily Standart.

But if the party doesn’t gain enough votes in the July 5 Bulgarian election, a coalition government could be possible, the paper writes.  If so, its capacities to continue the efforts for combating corruption and organized crime in the EU's poorest and most corrupted country may be considerably weakened.

"If the next government comes as a result of continuous talks, rhetoric might be softened and call for compromises," said Kiril Avramov, director of Political Capital. The Bulgarians are sick and tired of the vague reforms, the low living standard and the problems in the judicial system.

"I cast my vote because I wanted to see a more significant change," said Sofian Zheni Georgieva.

"Corruption must be uprooted. Other countries have mafia, here the mafia has a state," she said explicitly. In other political news, alleged mobster Plamen Galev has been confirmed as a candidate for the western town of Dupnitsa’s parliamentary seat.

Galev’s candidacy throws a wrench into a case against him in Sofia – he and his partner Angel Hristov have been charged with running an organized criminal group, but Galev, as a candidate for parliament, now receives immunity from prosecution. The court will not be able to set a date for the trial, reports the Sofia News Agency.

The agency also reported that Hristov submitted registration documents Friday to be confirmed as a Party for Liberal Alternative and Peace candidate for a seat in the nearby town of Kyustendil. Both men, known locally as the Galevi Brothers, might remain in jail because of paperwork glitches, though their immunity began at midnight Sunday.

The Galevi defense council - attorneys, Menko Menkov and Iordan Kirov, attempted Saturday to submit with the Kyustendil Court their clients' request to be released from jail. They, however, failed to file the request because the court is closed weekends. Menkov and Kirov also believe that the procedure might take up to 20 days - the entire period when MP hopefuls are allowed to conduct their election campaign.

Montenegro: Prosecutor, police sign memorandum

Montenegro’s state prosecution and top law enforcement were expected to vow to work together last week under the OSCE’s anti-organized crime action plan, reported UPI.

While the OSCE undoubtedly has its work cut out for it regarding organized crime in Montenegro – particularly after recent reports have once again highlighted Montenegrin leader Milo Djukanovic’s role in 1990s cigarette smuggling – it’s hard to applaud a step to strengthen a type of information exchange that should be par for the course.  

Europol: Human smuggling network dismantled

A total of 46 people were arrested in six countries last week, suspected of helping smuggle more than 5,000 illegal immigrants into and within the European Union, reported Europol.  Arrests were made in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and Switzerland for allegedly helping smuggle Iraqis, Afghans and others into and around the EU.Each smuggled person is believed to have paid between US $4,000 and $8,000 to reach Italy, usually in squalid conditions in trucks, campers or boats from Iraq to Europe via Turkey.  Also last week, the European Commission called for better immigration management and increased security cooperation among its 27 member countries.

"Organized crime progresses without caring about national frontiers," EU Justice Commissioner Jacques Barrot told reporters in Brussels, calling for the establishment of an exchange program for police and better usage of an existing program for judicial staffs.

Europe round-up

A former Colombo family mob boss warned Britain last week that it needs to wake up to match-fixing, in sports reported the Daily Telegraph.  Michael Franzese, a New York boss whose weekly turnover in the 1980s was around $7 million, compared policies in the UK to those in the US at one of the countless speaking engagements he’s had since his release from prison in the 1990s.

In Britain, the authorities are waking up to the threat of match-fixing amid a steady stream of investigations in sports as diverse as football, tennis, horse-racing, cricket and snooker. For football, the emerging danger is the potential co-operation between criminal gangs in Asia and Britain who target players in this country while placing their money in the Far Eastern gambling markets.

"The impression I get is that in England it is not looked at as a major problem," Franzese said. "In the States, the governing bodies in major sports see it as a major issue; there is enforcement and education. Gambling is accepted today, it's no longer done in the closet. I have more emails and communications with players who have got themselves in trouble today than ever. Just about everyone is corruptible if you do not have a policy in place."

Meanwhile, German prosecutors last week charged a former high-ranking Siemens manager with breach of trust over his alleged role in a notorious corruption scandal at the engineering giant.  Former Siemens communications head of finance Michael Kutschenreuter and two other former employees in the same branch face the charges. The Siemens corruption scandal first came to light in 2006; the company has since acknowledged that it made €1.3 billion in corrupt payments to secure business contracts around the world.