Nearly 50 countries that trade in high-priced Eastern Atlantic Bluefin Tuna agreed Saturday to transform an archaic paper-based method for tracking fish into a digitalized system that officials say will make it harder for fleets to smuggle plundered bluefin into market.

Member countries of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the body charged with protecting the bluefin stocks threatened by overfishing, will implement the new electronic system by the time ships set out in the spring of 2013.

Last year, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) exposed the paper-based Bluefin Catch Document scheme as so full of holes as to render it virtually useless. The system was riddled with inaccuracies and inconsistencies and did little to stop the thriving black market in bluefin. Before the ICIJ report, officials had lauded the system as a successful deterrent to illegal trade — a way to track every fish from hook, through fattening farms and to the final buyer.

OCCRP contributed to the series by looking at the Bluefin farming market in Croatia and overfishing in the Adriatic.

You can see the whole story here.

The defense team of Viktor Bout, a Russian national convicted in early November of conspiring to kill Americans, has requested a retrial on the grounds that members of the jury may have been influenced by the media.

Attorney Albert Dayan requested a re-trial, suggesting an evidentiary hearing for the jury as an alternative, because he said members of the jury had been exposed to “prejudicial material.” In a letter to the District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin, Dayan complained that the media myth surrounding Bout was too large to be concealed from the jury, and that it would take a “special” jury to look beyond Bout’s “prejudicial” portrayal in the media.

Dayan cited as evidence of this a New York Times article that quoted jury foreman Heather Hobbs saying she had seen the movie “Lord of War,” a 2005 film starring Nicholas Cage, but was not aware that the film was about Bout.  She told the New York Times that the film had no influence on her vote, and that the jury’s verdict was based on “overwhelming” evidence presented against Bout in court.

Dayan disagrees.  In a letter to Judge Sheindlin, he wrote that there is “clear, strong and incontrovertible” evidence that the jury had been biased.  “Bout was explicitly named as the inspiration for the film’s villainous lead character at the end thereof,” Dayan wrote, noting that Bout’s photograph was used in the film “to identify him.”

A legal vacuum, dearth of central oversight, and lack of political will have contributed to the perception that Kosovo’s dominant political parties have become the country’s most corrupt institutions, according the Kosova Democratic Institute (KDI) and Transparency International Kosova (TIK).

Their report, “CRINIS Kosova 2011: The Legislation and Practices in the Finances of Political Parties” analyzes the 2010 financial reports of the six dominant political parties in the world’s second-newest country and ranked internal book-keeping, state regulatory and oversight bodies, and transparency.

“This lack of transparency and accountability towards relevant institutions and towards the public resulted that in international reports the political parties to be estimated as the most corrupted institutions in Kosovo,” said Merita Mustafa, Transparency and Anti-Corruption Programme Manager of KDI,

To date, neither the Central Elections Commission nor any other government body has audited the 2009 election audit findings, and no body has imposed fines for incomplete financial reporting.

Documents show that Energoinvest lost out on millions of KM because of the suspect way it went about trying to recover long-standing debts.

By The Center for Investigative Reporting

Patience can pay.

 

Six Estonian nationals were arrested on Tuesday in connection with a sophisticated cyber theft scheme. An additional suspect, a Russian national, is still at large. The arrests came after a two year FBI investigation, Operation Ghost Click, which was conducted with the help of numerous international agencies and private sector parties.

The federal indictment unsealed in New York on Wednesday states that since 2007 the suspects have infected some 4 million computers worldwide with malware that enabled them to control web traffic on infected machines, as well as to manipulate the web advertising industry. Besides personal and business-owned computers, the hackers also infected machines belonging to NASA.

Romanian media mogul, Sorin Ovidiu Vantu and the head of the Employees Union at the Romanian Petrom Service gas company, Liviu Luca were detained for 24 hours on Monday related to charges of embezzlement from Petrom Service and money laundering, amounting to some € 83 million. On Tuesday, a judge issued an additional arrest warrant for 29 days.

A group of companies connected to Vantu is the owner Realitatea-Catavencu, a privately held group of media companies. He is also the former main shareholder in Realitatea Media, a TV station that he sold earlier this year to a real estate investor Elan Swartzenberg and a series of offshore companies. Liviu Luca also owns Realitatea Media shares.

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Also detained were businessman Ovidiu Turcan, and the former director of Petrom Service, Gheorghe Supeala. The four Romanian businessmen are accused of using Petrom money to buy overvalued shares in other companies, then transferring the earnings to offshore ,  company, and personal accounts in order to conceal the true identity of the beneficiaries. Allegedly, Realitatea Media received around € 14.2 million, SC Imobiliar Network 2002 received some € 6.7 million, and SC GM Invest SA around € 1.3 million.

The prosecutors said that their actions led to the bankruptcy of Patrom Service which caused losses of € 98 million to the state. Also affected were the 72,000 members of the Employees Union at Petrom Service - the minority shareholders in the company – who lost their investments.

Vantu, who was considered the 5^th richest man in Romania in 2008, is no stranger to the Romanian judiciary system. He was detained in April this year for allegedly blackmailing Sebastian Ghita, a manager at Realitatea Media at the time. Along with two others, Vantu was also investigated for aiding Nicolae Popa, the Romanian businessman convicted for running the Fondul National de Investitii (FNI) Ponzi scheme. Popa fled to Indonesia to escape imprisonment, and was extradited to Romania earlier this year. Thousands of people lost their savings when the FNI fond went bankrupt in 2000. Although Vantu founded the FNI fond, he was never indicted in the case.

Many of Vantu’s companies were set up by Laszlo Kiss, the offshore company registration agent featured in OCCRP’s project Offshore Crime Inc. Kiss was arrested for evading taxes for his role in designing the Petrom Service scheme.

 

The death of a prominent guerilla leader may represent a turning point in Colombia’s war on drugs.  Alfonso Cano, the leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was killed in a military air raid on Friday. Colombian authorities are viewing Cano’s death as an important victory in their decades-long fight against drug trafficking.

Cano, whose real name was Guillermo Saenz, was a former student activist and a member of the Communist Party. He assumed the leadership of FARC in 2008, after the group’s long time leader Manuel Marulanda Velez died of natural causes.

In addition to kidnapping and extortion, FARC relies on drug production and trafficking for funding.

A prosecution witness and a former member of Zijad Turković's organized crime group, refused to testify in court despite his previous agreement with prosecutors.

The State Prosecutor Diana Kajmaković said that during preparations for his court appearance on Wednesday, witness Danijel Planinčić expressed a concern for his safety in prison, and said that he had been threatened. However, Planinčić denied this during the trial, saying that no one has threatened him, and that he is not afraid of anything. He also acknowledged that his refusal to testify meant a fine of €5,000.

Four Bosnians were arrested Tuesday on suspicion of international weapons trafficking.  Police raided the northern Bosnian city of Doboj, and seized a large quantity of explosives and weapons from private residences.  The investigation is part of a multi-month probe into weapons trafficking being led by Office of the Prosecutor of BiH, the District Prosecutor's Office in Doboj, and the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA).

Some of the detainees work in public institutions.  Goran Lukić  “Lisac” (Fox), is a police officer who worked in the agency responsible for issuing state identification documents.  He was arrested with Goran Đurić and Goran Danilović. All three are facing charges of international weapons and drug trafficking.

A Manhattan federal jury found Russian Viktor Bout guilty Wednesday evening on four counts of conspiracy to sell antiaircraft weapons and other arms to a group designated by the US as terrorists.  Bout, 44, will be sentenced in February, and faces 25 years to life in prison.

The verdict completes a long standing investigation and a sting operation that started five years ago, when undercover agents posed as members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), trying to buy arms from Bout.  Bout and another associate, Andrew Smulian, who testified for the prosecution, were arrested in a Bangkok hotel room in June 2008 after they met with the agents. FARC is considered a terrorist group by the US Government.

“With today’s swift verdict, justice has been done and a very dangerous man will be behind bars,” said Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. “As the evidence at trial showed, Viktor Bout was ready to sell a weapons arsenal that would be the envy of some small countries. He aimed to sell those weapons to terrorists for the purpose of killing Americans.”