European Union legislators voted on Tuesday in support of a draft anti-corruption law. Its rhetoric echoes U.S. regulations which make oil, gas and mining firms declare payments they make for commodities and other services in resource-rich nations, Reuters reported. The rules are designed to provide greater transparency and eliminate bribery in industries where it is common.
A violent gang in Virginia used social media sites to recruit high-school girls for prostitution, the FBI reports. The leader of the gang, 27-year-old Justin Strom, was sentenced to 40 years in prison last week for his role in orchestrating the enterprise during a three-year period ending in March, 2012. Four other defendants, all of whom pleaded guilty, were sentenced to a total of 53 years.
Strom and his associates, the “Underground Gangster Crips,” used a simple approach: They scoured social networking sites, looking for attractive girls. They contacted chosen victims with phony identities and lured them into personal meetings with compliments. After offering them illegal drugs and alcohol, and occasionally demanding sexual “tryouts,” they hired them out for commercial sex.
Some of the underage girls were threatened with violence if they did not perform, the FBI press office indicated in its report, and many of them were sedated with regular doses of drugs and alcohol. The report said that Strom and his cohorts also recruited girls from school yards and bus stops, and that there was no evident discrimination based on race or class.
The digital arm of sex trafficking is perhaps its most frightening, due to the lack of regulation and transparency on the web. The National Human Trafficking Resource Center in Washington cites three specific dangers with respect to sex ads posted on the internet:
The US website Craigslist is the most flagrant example. When its Adult Services Section became available, there were between 10-16,000 postings per day in the US alone. In 2008, an FBI investigation found that more than 2,800 Craigslist sex ads were for prostituted children.
Swedish TV, with help from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), has since learned that Takilant, Ltd is in fact a sole proprietorship whose owner is publicly connected to Gulnara Karimova, daughter to long-time Uzbeki dictator.
On Tuesday, Ukraine’s parliament approved on first reading legislation which would criminalize defamation. The bill, which was introduced by Regions Party member Vitaliy Zhuravsky in July and revised in September, represents the latest divot in Ukraine’s bumpy road to press freedom. The bill goes against the international trend of making libel a civil rather than criminal case.
Under the bill, defamation would be returned to the national criminal code and would be punishable by fine, correctional labor, or restraint of freedom for up to two years. Additionally, members of the media, investigators, prosecutors and judges could be suspended for 1-3 years, the Kiev Post reports.
According to Igor Rozkladaj of Kiev’s Media Law Institute, the proposed law is almost identical to a law passed in Russia this year. And it’s a “copy-and-paste” of legal provisions on slander and insult Ukraine had on the books until 2001.
Reporters without Borders released an official statement Wednesday to the same effect, condemning the parliamentary vote.
"Such a return to the past would have a major impact on freedom of information in Ukraine,” it says. “Journalists already have to confront many dangers…inside news organizations. Now they would have to fear judicial harassment as well. The resulting intimidatory effect would threaten the very existence of independent journalism."
Since 2010, Ukraine’s press freedom has been increasingly threatened. The Washington-based NGO Freedom House rates developing countries on their progress toward democracy and gave Ukraine a declining media score in its 2011 report. Contributing factors included a pro-government bias in its coverage of politically sensitive topics and evident self-censorship.
Furthermore, “media watchdogs warned of physical attacks against journalists, and digital broadcasting frequencies were distributed in a way that favored media owners with government connections,” Freedom House reported.
The European Federation of Journalists also censured Ukraine’s media restrictions, responding in particular to a bill which proposed a government council for the “protection of public morals,” in 2011.
“The Ukrainian authorities refer to values imposed unilaterally on media in order to control the content and to threaten journalists with disproportionate measures,” said EFJ president Arne Honig in a 2011 press report.
The public morals bill, originally proposed in October, 2011, is still under debate. But according to parliamentary statute, the defamation bill could pass in as early as two weeks. It must first undergo two further (concurrent) readings and must then be signed into law by President Viktor Yanukovich. It would take effect on December 1, 2012.
Igor Rozkladaj says the law presents the gravest danger to those journalists who report on corruption, “especially those who work in small towns. It could also strongly influence bloggers and NGOs who [engage in] anti-corruption activity,” he says.
Alleged organized crime boss and long-time police target Naser Kelmendi is now the subject of an international arrest warrant from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), OCCRP has learned.
Kelmendi is the Kosovo-born businessman and alleged drug kingpin around whom last week’s SIPA operation, codenamed “Doll” was centered. Kelmendi’s hotel, the Casa Grande in Ilidja, a suburb of Sarajevo, was raided, but Kelmendi himself was not arrested; he and several other targets were out of the country at the time of the sweep.
Monday afternoon, the BiH Prosecutor’s office requested international warrants in connection with Operation “Doll” for multiple suspects who are outside of the country, said spokesperson Boris Grubešić. That office would not specify the names of the suspects, but OCCRP has received confirmation from a high-ranking law enforcement and security official in Bosnia and Herzegovina that Kelmendi’s name was on the list.
If the Prosecutor’s request for warrants is granted by the court of BiH, those warrants will transfer to the jurisdiction of Interpol.
Although Kelmendi evaded Wednesday's sweep, twenty-five men were arrested. On Friday, the court of Bosnia and Herzegovina confirmed that 18 of the 25 will be held in custody for one month on suspicions of organized crime. This is a precautionary measure before official sentencing, the Prosecutor's Office said, due to circumstances which suggest the arrested persons might flee the country, tamper with evidence, or repeat the offense if released.
If these suspects are convicted, their prison sentence will be at least 10 years.
Kelmendi also frequently operates from Montenegro where he also owns a hotel.
In a massive raid Wednesday morning, Bosnian police arrested 25 people they say are associated with a Bosnian drug gang on suspicion of murders, multimillion-dollar robberies and other serious organized crimes.
Several hundred officers searched 30 sites, including the Casa Grande Hotel, owned by Naser Kelmendi, a Kosovo-born businessman whom US officials have blacklisted as an international drug lord.
According to information from Sarajevo’s ministry of interior affairs, Kelmendi himself has not been arrested. In June, he was added to a list of 97 foreign criminals who face sanctions under the US Kingpin Act.
The director of the Bosnian state security agency SIPA, Goran Zubac, said in a press conference that the raids were only the first phase in a much larger operation aimed to dismantle Bosnia’s largest organized crime organization.
“Further coordinated actions and arrests will be carried out after thorough analysis and deliberation,” he said.
Zubac indicated that SIPA has managed to collect substantial evidence, including the identification of the organization’s members, their habits and interests, as well as their associates within government structures in BiH.
Members have been linked to six unsolved murders, the robbery of 4.4 million KM from the Privredna Bank of Sarajevo and the robbery of 660,000 KM from the BH Post.
Zubac identified a selection of other committed crimes as well. They included the intent to murder a police officer who had been investigating their organization, major robberies and loan-sharking.
All these crimes, according to Zubac, were committed with the aim of acquiring huge material benefit and inciting fear among the citizenry. He said that their actions could have grave and unforeseeable repercussions on the Bosnian state.
The repercussions on Naser Kelmendi are equally unforeseeable.
Kelmendi is a known business associate of Fahrudin Radoncic, the Bosnian politician and newspaper owner who is widely believed to be trying to secure the position of minister of security, which controls SIPA.
Radoncic’s paper Dnevni Avaz announced the raid three days earlier, saying it was an attempt to discredit the owner. Furthermore, Radoncic’s ministry appointment has been stalled and may be dead after disagreements between parties in the ruling coalition.
-Sam Allard
Both Russia’s and Bulgaria’s state-controlled natural gas companies have come under investigation for anti-trust practices, the European Commission announced last week.
The Parliament of Bosnia Herzegovina called Thursday for further investigation into reports that the government violated United Nations weapons bans by exporting munitions to embargoed countries in the years following the war.
As part of its agreement with the United Nations, Bosnia Herzegovina agreed to destroy such arms, under the direction and supervision of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
But evidence shows that arms were not destroyed but sold by two private companies to countries that are under UN embargo. The names of those countries are not clear.
The Bosnian Ministry of Defense stored surplus arms at military bases and two private companies were contracted to destroy the weapons: Vogosca-based “Pretis” and Bugojno based “Binas”. “Pretis” got approval from the ministry to take explosives from its warehouse despite the fact that it had no license or contract to destroy weapons. Those munitions were sold abroad.
A second company, Binas, claimed from an army warehouse in feb 2011 24,565 handgrenades which they said were their own but the Parliament questioned why a private company would have grenades in a military warehouse and they ordered the matter looked into.
The Parliament noted that “there are serious indications that the ammunition taken from the warehouse of the Armed Forces was not destroyed but exported by Bosnia and Herzegovina to countries which the United Nations had banned the export of weaponry.”
Thus far, the investigation indicates that between 2006 and 2010, the Bosnian Ministry of Defense did not track or follow the whereabouts of its surplus military equipment. Ministry officials cannot say how much equipment slated for destruction was sold.
Bosnia Herzegovina, Cocaine
Griselda Blanco, the Colombian drug lord widely known as the ‘Godmother of Cocaine’ was killed Monday by an unidentified gunman, according to Colombian media reports.
Blanco, 69, was leaving a butcher shop in her home city of Medellin when she was shot in the head by a man who rode up to the shop on a motorcycle and dispatched two bullets before driving away.
Also known as “the Queen of Cocaine,” Blanco served almost twenty years in U.S. jails for drug trafficking before being deported back to Colombia in 2004. She was tied to as many as 40 murders – including those of two of her ex-husbands - but only charged with three, for which she served a 20-year sentence concurrently with her drug sentence.
A fan of the “Godfather” film franchise, Blanco so enjoyecold her own reputation that she named her fourth son Michael Corleone, after the classic film’s main character, according to news reports.