Two members of Darko Saric’s drug trafficking group have pled guilty as part of a plea bargain with Serbian prosecutors, Blic news reported Thursday. Serbian nationals Mirko Miodragovic and his son Aleksandar admitted to smuggling cocaine for Saric in Brazil. 

Mirko Miodragovic was charged with smuggling 1.1 tons of cocaine for Saric in 2008, and for being a member of an organized crime group.

He was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison after the Special Court for Organized Crime in Belgrade confirmed his guilt admission agreement on Wednesday. In addition to the prison sentence, the authorities seized €70,000 (US$92,600) of his assets that were illegally obtained, a source at the Prosecutor’s Office told Blic news.

The former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko might be released if all other disagreements between Ukraine and the European Union (EU) are resolved, the Ukrainian First Deputy Prime Minister Valeriy Khoroshkovskiy told the press in Brussels on Wednesday.

Tymoshenko is serving a seven-year sentence for abuse of power revolving around a gas contract with Russia. Her case is viewed by the international community as political prosecution and selective justice, and it brought tension to the relations between Ukraine and the EU. Negotiations on a pivotal free trade agreement included in the Association Agreement have practically stopped.

Business participation in the global fight against corruption is crucial, said the Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Yury Fedotov on Tuesday. Fedotov was commenting on a new United Nations initiative introduced during the week-long meeting of the International Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ) in Vienna.

The Integrity Initial Public Offering (IPO) initiative will be launched later this week. The UN is encouraging Private investors and companies to fund the development of anti-corruption institutions and legislation in developing countries, where corruption adds up to ten percent to the cost of doing business.

A Moscow police captain has been arrested for corruption, Russian police said Monday. 

The unnamed captain was charged with accepting US$40,000 in bribes from a car dealer for turning a blind eye to his illegal activities. The captain’s superiors also will be punished, according to a police spokesperson. 

Russian law enforcement has been shaken by a series of scandals over the past three years, revolving around corruption and police brutality. The scandals caused a domestic and international revolt, and major human rights organizations urged the Russian government to act.

The Macedonian police arrested five Macedonian and two Serbian members of an international credit card theft group, the police said Saturday. A Bulgarian national is also believed to be a member of the group which stole over MKD 4 million (US$92,000) from Macedonian citizens between November 2011 and April 2012.

In January the authorities suspected that an organized crime group was electronically stealing credit card information in Macedonia. Further investigation revealed that the suspects came from Macedonia, Serbia and Bulgaria, and the police forces of the three countries began a joint investigation.

The trial against former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is an example of selective justice, said US ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft at a Thursday lecture. He added that the US has no evidence of Tymoshenko’s involvement in the 1996 murder of her business rival Yevhen Scherban, which her political opponents have linked her to.

Answering students’ questions after a lecture at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy School of Law, Tefft said that the American Embassy in Kyiv received a letter from Scherban’s son Ruslan, asking the US authorities to share any evidence they might have about his father’s murder.

The trial of Serbia’s notorious drug lord Sreten “Joca Amsterdam” Jocic for the 2008 murders of the Croatian journalist Ivo Pukanic and his colleague Niko Franic restarted Thursday in Belgrade. The court approved a request from Jocic’s defense for a retrial because of a relevant change in the Serbian criminal procedure law introduced in January. 

The start of the new trial was delayed twice, in February and March, because Jocic’s defense was not prepared, and because a member of the judge’s committee had to be replaced due to death in the family.

Fiver Serbian citizens have been arrested in an operation against an international weapons trafficking ring in Brussels, the Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office said Tuesday. Three Turkish nationals were also arrested. 

Belgian police began investigating late last year after learning that Belgian and foreign organized crime groups were buying weapons and explosives in Brussels. The authorities quickly learned that Serbian citizens were supplying the network. 

Former Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader pled not guilty to skimming public funds, at the start of the Fimi Media trial on Monday. Sanader was charged with creating slush funds for his political party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), as well as for taking money for his personal use. HDZ itself is a defendant, making this the first trial against a political party in Croatia. 

“I plead not guilty on all counts, and I believe that the indictment is contrived. We will prove this during the trial” Sanader told the court.

Nine members of an international cocaine smuggling ring were indicted on Friday for drug trafficking by the Croatian Bureau for Combating Corruption and Organized Crime (USKOK). The defendants were arrested last April in Austria and Slovenia, during an international police operation codenamed “Spider Web.” 

All nine defendants are charged with trafficking large amounts of cocaine from the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic to Europe, between the fall of 2010 and April 2011. The defendants used rented private jets to transport the drugs from South America into Europe. A portion of the drugs were sold on the Croatian market, and the rest was sold in Western European countries.