Italy Passes ‘Berlusconi bill’

Italy Passes ‘Berlusconi bill’

Italy’s Senate Wednesday passed the so-called “Berlusconi bill,” which would freeze hundreds of long-running trials for one year, including one in Milan involving Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The country’s national judges’ association says 100,000 trials will be disrupted and chaos will result.

The PM’s lawyer says the measures are perfectly fair, but the BBC also reports:

Nonetheless, Mr. Berlusconi is coming under increasing political attack for concentrating on his own personal legal problems at the beginning of his new stint as head of government, rather than on such important national issues as the future of the almost bankrupt national airline Alitalia and the Naples rubbish crisis.

As if that weren’t enough, the Italian cabinet Friday approved a bill that would give blanket immunity from prosecution to the prime minister, the president and the speakers of both houses. The bill now moves to parliament, where Berlusconi’s center-right coalition holds a majority. A similar law Berlusconi signed five years ago, however, was thrown out by the constitutional court, and various proceedings against him were reactivated.

In Milan, Berlusconi is facing charges he bribed his former lawyer to give false testimony in another case. His legal team has been trying to have a judge removed on the grounds of bias.

In other trials -- the Financial Times counts 17 Berlusconi has been through – charges have either been dismissed, or convictions have lapsed during appeals because of the statute of limitations.

Swiss Arrest 30 in Drug Crackdown

Swiss police said last Thursday that they’d arrested 30 people for alleged involvement in an international cocaine-smuggling ring, and seized 46 pounds of cocaine and 780,000 francs ($750,000) in cash during the accompanying raids.

The nationalities of the suspects are literally all over the map. The case opened last summer, when Geneva airport authorities found a woman from Cameroon smuggling 22 pounds of cocaine in her double-bottomed suitcase and arrested a Nigerian man who was allegedly going to receive part of the shipment the same day. Last winter, Swiss police arrested the suspected head of the network, a Togolese man living in Belgium, who was carrying $142,000 at the time of the arrest. A Lithuanian woman with him was arrested for importing 8.8 pounds of cocaine. Officials say a used-car salesman in Bern was in charge of laundering the cash from the proceeds.

Organizations Join to Fight Medical Fraud

After the Washington Post recently documented astonishing cases of medical fraud – including a case of one woman who took the U.S. government for $105 million using 140,000 fake Medicare claims – a group of anti-fraud organizations announced that they would be banding together to fight the scourge.

The Consortium to Combat Medical Fraud is made up of good people from organizations such as the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association and the National Insurance Crime Bureau, who no doubt have the best intentions of going after these charlatans. And insurance investigators tend to do work that would put Philip Marlowe to shame. So why can’t they just say so? Instead we get this:

This Consortium will address this by increasing collaboration in a number of ways:

* Sharing information across industry and among stakeholders;

* Leveraging industry best practices;

* Influencing the public policy debate and shaping the future agenda; and

* Optimizing and aligning objectives of various associations.

The authorities uncovered a whole rash of medical fraud in Florida not by sharing information with stakeholders, but by smart thinking: investigators noticed that more than half of the medical equipment companies they visited in the Miami area were either not open when they said they would be and/or had no telephone numbers. Places in the Miami area were also billing the government for HIV-related treatments that in total were 22 times the amount that any comparable area in the country was billing. It was gumshoe work in this case that brought indictments, and more of the same -- not “leveraging industry best practices” -- will bring more.

Mexico to Receive Drug War Aid

The U.S. Senate last week approved 92-6 a three-year, $1.6-billion package to help Mexico and Central America fight drug trafficking, the Houston Chronicle reports. The newspaper says:

The new anti-narcotics aid package — which is more than 10 times the $37 million disbursed to Mexico last year — is in the form of equipment, not cash. It would enable Mexico to buy more military transport planes, beef up border security to stem the flow of illegal weapons, and equip its inspectors with high-tech computer detection equipment.

However, about $57 million is contingent upon the government meeting human rights conditions.

"The United States wants to work with Mexico on these issues, including the need to hold accountable members of the military and the police who violate human rights," said a U.S. Senate aide who helped draft the bill. "This is not a blank check."

The plan calls for $73.5 million to be spent on judicial reform, institution-building and other activities aimed at strengthening the rule of law and combating corruption in Mexico. It also allocates $3 million to help Mexico create a national police registry.

The night of the Senate vote, a federal police commander investigating corruption within the force was killed as he ate tacos in Mexico City by an Uzi-wielding hit man. Igor Labastida was the fourth police commander to be killed in the capital in two months. Some 450 of the 4,400 people killed in the country since President Felipe Calderon declared war on drug gangs in January 2007 were police, soldiers or government officials.

News from a recent forum in Mexico City – at which U.N. consultant Edgardo Buscaglia ranked Mexico sixth in the world for organized crime presence and said that up to 60 percent of Mexico’s cities were controlled by organized crime – was only covered by anti-illegal immigration sites in the U.S. or specialty news organizations like this one.

Actress’s Ex Arrested for Fraud

And in news from the celebrity world, actress Anne Hathaway’s ex-boyfriend was arrested last Wednesday on suspicion of federal wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering.

Raffaello Follieri, 29, a “foppish Italian businessman with an aristocratic swagger and wallet to match” (the Independent), was reported to be accused of lying to an investor , claiming he was working as the chief financial officer for the Vatican – a job which a savvy investor might know does not exist – and that his proclaimed extensive contacts at the Vatican would help him purchase church properties for redevelopment at good prices. The Times reports:

He is also said to have paid lowly church officials to dress up in Vatican robes to make it appear that he was well connected. His main contact in Rome is said by prosecutors to be the nephew of a retired cardinal.

The Independent also discusses the extravagant lifestyle this scam apparently funded: the $37,000 per month apartment on the upper floor of the Trump Tower, $3,000 suits, and the high-end girlfriend who starred in The Devil Wears Prada.

The trouble with all of this, according to federal prosecutors and court documents, is that nothing he said about his ties with the Holy See was true. Mr Follieri, boomed District Attorney Reed Brodsky in court on Tuesday, "is a con man. He was able to con a lot of people out of a lot of money and did it over a long period of time. He was able to deceive everyone from the most sophisticated investor to the naive person." He told the court that "the evidence in this case is overwhelming."