Bulgaria’s top cop resigns

Beleaguered Bulgarian interior minister Rumen Petkov resigned on Sunday over a corruption scandal that has been brewing for weeks, and appears to link Bulgaria’s organized criminals to top-ranking police officials.

The background to the story, as reported by AFP, makes Bulgaria sound like the corrupt, criminal society that various observers have warned that it is, well before Bulgaria joined the European Union in January 2007:

The saga began in mid-March when tapped telephone calls revealed that high-ranking interior ministry officials had scuppered a number of police operations by leaking information to key criminals under investigation.
A top crime-busting chief and a former ministry chief of staff were arrested and charged following the revelations.

The ministry's current chief of staff was also placed on leave, and Petkov himself came under fire after admitting to having contacts with key organised crime suspects. He had initially refused to resign and was backed by the three-party coalition after promising sweeping changes at the ministry's unit for fighting organised crime and the strengthening of controls over the use of bugging devices. But a recent poll from the Alpha research institute showed that support for Petkov remaining in office was down to just nine percent.

The two execution-style killings last week sparked vehement criticism from the European Union and put further pressure on the government.
Georgy Stoyev, who had written nine books on the Bulgarian mafia, was shot in the head on Monday outside a central Sofia hotel. The night before, Borislav Georgiev, the chief executive of a large energy company, was killed in his apartment building with two bullets to the head. In his last televised appearance on March 29, Stoyev had requested protection to testify against the mafia and said there was "beyond all doubt" a high-level political umbrella over the underworld.

The malfeasance and murders that have stained Bulgaria’s reputation in recent weeks prompted the Times of London to write last week that Bulgaria deserves, as the article was titled, “One more chance – then turn off the Brussels money tap.” Chief foreign commentator Bronwen Maddox noted that:

Once the EU let in Bulgaria and Romania it lost its main tool to persuade them to reform…The predicament follows from the failure of the EU to attach many conditions to the behaviour of the new members. It was too confident in its power to transform countries by simple virtue of membership. No future entrants will get away as lightly as Bulgaria and Romania.

Ms Maddox recommended that the European Commission demand “proper reforms” of the interior ministry before beginning to cut the more than €6.5 billion that Bulgaria is due to receive under seven EU programs by 2013. Whether the interior minister’s resignation will count as a proper reform remains to be seen.

On the European Commission side, officials there have said that the resignation came without any EC pressure on the Bulgarian government or the country’s prime minister, though the Commission has exhorted the Bulgarians to clean up their act for months and frozen funds from several programs.

Petkov’s resignation came just two days after Bulgaria’s Socialist-led government survived a vote of no confidence last Friday, 117 to 82 with 35 abstentions.

Art theft funds organized crime

Thefts of great works of art is the third most profitable criminal enterprise in the world, just after trafficking in weapons and drugs, reports the Zurich-based International Relations and Security Network (ISN).

In a refrain common to many types of organized crime, the report notes that the criminals are cooperating more over international border than are their counterparts in the police. Law enforcement in the European Union, for example, is hampered by a lack of over-the-border police cooperation and central databases on stolen artworks. At the same time, museums in eastern Europe have relatively low security and quite valuable collections, making them vulnerable to being preyed upon by criminal groups.

Another website, the home of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art, puts the crime into perspective:

One of the greatest problems is that neither the general public, nor government officials, realize the severity of art crime. Art crime funds all organized crime enterprises, including terrorism. And yet it is often dismissed as a victimless crime, because it is not understood. Italy has by far the most art crime, with approximately 20,000 art thefts reported each year. Russia has the second most, with approximately 2000 art thefts reported per year.Italy is the only country whose government takes art crime as seriously as it should. Italy’s Carabinieri are by far the most successful art squad worldwide, employing over 300 agents full time. Other countries have had great success with their art squads, despite lack of governmental support, while many countries do not have a single officer dedicated to art crime, the third largest criminal enterprise worldwide.

Poland’s football follies

Various articles have appeared online recently announcing the latest football scandal in Poland. The phrases “corruption” and even “ties to organized crime” have been bandied about in the articles, but there’s one catch: None of the articles mention what the scandal is actually about, or who is being investigated for which suspected crime.

The most egregious of these articles can be found here. The article duly mentions the 29 football clubs and the more than 100 people who are supposedly in the doghouse over the scandal, but, in a feat of journalism that would make any former communist editor proud, the reporter utterly fails to mention a single detail of the alleged scandal.

A bit of digging around online, however, showed that it’s likely we’re talking about taking bribes or match-fixing, as those were the crimes that Polish referees and coaches have been involved with before.


{moscomment}