Spanish police detained Shushanashvili's brother Kakhaber -- the leader of the European branch of the gang -- on Monday in the northeastern city of Barcelona where the group based its operations.
He was one of about 80 suspected members of the gang which stole and trafficked goods around Europe who were detained in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Spain since Monday following a year-long investigation.
The suspects were held on suspicion of the theft of large quantities of jewels and other luxury items, drugs and weapons trafficking, money laundering, extortion and conspiracy to murder.
Though most of the crimes – mainly jewelry theft – were committed in Austria and other countries, Spain was the gang’s main hub for laundering their profits. Some 170 Spanish police were involved in the raids.
Until relatively recently, Spain’s weather and booming property markets had attracted various crime groups from Italy and the former Soviet Union. But here’s one Spanish official on what the March 15 raids will mean to international bad guys who try to make Spain their second home:
Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said the operation had sent "a very strong message to mafia gangs" that they are not welcome in Spain. "This is a message that they understand very well. Mafia gangs move and go where they are most comfortable. Here they will be very, very, very ill at ease," he told public radio RNE on Tuesday.
The operation is the third in Spain in recent years against organized crime gangs from Eastern Europe. Operation Avispa in 2005 and 2006 led to the arrests of 28 Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians and Spaniards. In Operation Troika in 2008, Spanish police broke up an organized crime network based in the Russian city of St Petersburg, arresting 20 people. Police described that gang, the Tambovskaya-Malyshevskaya, as "one of the four biggest in the world".
Spanish police have also made scores of arrests in recent years of members of the Italian mafia.
Regional/International
Remember that big Foreign Corrupt Practices Act sting in January? More than 20 executives and employees of companies that equip militaries and police were arrested in the US for allegedly bribing foreign government officials in exchange for contracts. It was the biggest to-date FCPA bust, and it was the first time the FBI went undercover to enforce that particular law. Now, according to a letter obtained by the Washington Post, it appears that the executive who cooperated with the FBI to help build the case was named by a UN internal investigation as having bribed two former UN officials to gain his company procurement contracts. Here’s the takeaway, according to the AP:
The story of (former Florida executive Richard) Bistrong and the military equipment suppliers shows how vulnerable the United Nations is to corruption in the way billions of dollars a year that it oversees are spent. It also raises questions about how well that spending will be monitored in the future: The anti-corruption unit that first uncovered the bribery and bid-rigging was disbanded in 2008, after more than 300 investigations in three years.
"It is greatly disturbing that an organization plagued by corruption and mismanagement would disband its anti-corruption task force," said U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who has proposed requiring the U.N. to do more to fight corruption or risk losing U.S. financial support.
In other international news, the US, the UK and the Cayman Islands are the most popular secrecy jurisdictions in which non-residents deposit money. Hong Kong, Luxembourg and Switzerland are also in the top ten, according to a new report from financial secrecy watchdog Global Financial Integrity.
Also last week, a major US bank agreed to pay the Department of Justice $160 million to settle charges that it willfully failed to set up an anti-money laundering program, which led to Mexican drug cartels laundering at least $110 million through the bank.
And in sports corruption news, European football’s governing body UEFA banned a match-fixing Ukrainian referee from the game for life last week. UEFA’s disciplinary panel for this case used information from a wide-ranging German corruption investigation into 200 matches played in at least 11 countries. Investigators believe that Croatian betting syndicates made at least €10 million by bribing players and officials to fix matches.
Serbia: Subotic connections to Saric?
Suspected cigarette smuggling kingpin Stanko Subotic called in to a live television show in Belgrade last week (supposedly from Geneva, though he’s under indictment in Serbia) to talk crime. A Sunday talk show was interviewing Montenegro’s main opposition politician, who has speculated that Montenegrin authorities are hiding both fugitive cocaine trafficking suspect Darko Saric and Subotic in a police villa in Montenegro. Subotic called in, and among other things said that two prominent Serbian businessmen had swindled him out of €50 million, and then used that money to buy a popular newspaper and the Port of Belgrade. Serbia’s organized crime prosecutor said his office would look into those allegations.
Insider-baseball accusations aside, the real story about Subotic and Saric is the overlap between 1990s cigarette smuggling and today’s cocaine smuggling, and the 2008 murder of a prominent Croatian journalist. B92 reports:
Police and prosecution obtained the first information about a possible connection between Subotić and Šarić through investigations into cocaine money laundering, B92 has learned. At the same time Italian investigative authorities confirmed that the same channels through which cigarettes had been smuggled in the 1990s were also used for drug smuggling.
In Italy, Subotić is accused as one of the organizers of cigarette smuggling and as being "the creator of the money laundering system”, during almost ten years of illegal cigarette trade, Italian prosecutors said.
Montenegrin media have reported that Subotić met with Šarić in the northern town of Pljevlja after the arrest warrant for tobacco smuggling had been issued in Serbia.
Meanwhile, Argentine television Todo Noticias (TN) reported that Argentine Federal Police (PFA), involved in Operation Balkan Warrior – which thwarted Šarić's attempt to smuggle more than two tons of cocaine – had a list of suspects in the case, containing Subotić's name.
Pre-trial proceedings are also being conducted against him in Serbia under suspicion that he was involved in the 2008 murder of Croatian journalist Ivo Pukanić and his associate Niko Franić.
In other “connections” news from Serbia, last week the authorities appeared to recognize the connection between war crimes and organized crime by for the first time seizing the assets of suspected war criminals.
And lastly in news from Serbia, a scholar pointed out that the country has made a good start in fighting organized crime, what with Balkan Warrior and other operations. But Zlatko Nikolic, a fellow at the Institute for Sociological and Criminological Research, also said he thinks the police haven’t worked their way up these criminal networks’ power structures. And he noted that judicial reform has not yet produced results, which could mean the courts aren’t ready to take on what will undoubtedly be some very big cases.
Bulgaria prepares for EU report
The judiciary in Bulgaria will likely be the subject of EU criticism when commissioners from the 27-nation bloc issue a report on Bulgaria’s progress in fighting crime later this week. According to leaked drafts, the report will cover the courts’ “severe flaws,” including delays in processing important cases.
The report is anxiously awaited by the current government, which took over last July. Its predecessor government saw the EU freeze hundreds of millions in aid to Bulgaria over concerns about organized crime and corruption. Both Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in January 2007, but EU concerns about crime, corruption and the slow pace of reforms means that both countries are subject to this type of monitoring from Brussels.
