Finally, some bad news about the other Balkans country that joined the European Union last year. Bulgaria may have been in the spotlight lately, what with its interior minister having to resign over alleged ties to organized crime, but it appears that Romania may be home to various nefarious business too.
A financial consultant working for Allianz-Tiriac insurance is under investigation for an alleged fraud involving €3 million (US$4.73million).
Police in Bucharest said Tuesday that the insurance agent, whose name was not disclosed, cheated about 120 people over the past 18 months. The case is being investigated by anti-corruptionprosecutors.
The agent allegedly persuaded wealthy people to invest sums of €20,000-€80,00 (US$31,520-US$126,080) with the help of 100 accomplices presenting them with false information that they would double theirinvestment.
The investors discovered months later that they did not even get back their own money and more than 30 filed a legalcomplaint.
Bulgaria busts Chechens
Meanwhile, the Bulgarians said on May 30 that they’d broken up a criminal network suspected of financing rebel groups in Chechnya, reported Reuters.
The gang of mainly Chechens was involved in racketeering, blackmail, arms deals, money laundering and cigarette smuggling, the national security agency said in a statement. “The group is suspected of financing terrorist formations in Chechnya,” it said.
It did not say how many members of the gang, which it said had been operating in Bulgaria since the end of the 1990s, were arrested.
Report: Heroin financing PKK
A substantial part of the money earned on Turkey’s heroin highway is funding radical groups, including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), says the recent annual report from Turkey’s interior ministry’s department for anti-smuggling and organized crime, or KOM.
Eurasia Daily Monitor (put out by the Jamestown Foundation), however, was skeptical of Turkey’s claims that the PKK is the main bad guy in the heroin trade.
The KOM report also claimed that the PKK was responsible for a significant proportion of the heroin being trafficked through Turkey into Europe. Although there is evidence to suggest that the PKK is sometimes directly involved in heroin trafficking, it is believed to more commonly exact a levy on the heroin trade by taxing the actual traffickers. Ethnic Kurds now control most of the heroin trade through Turkey into Europe, having displaced the organized crime networks from the Turkish Black Sea region that dominated the trade in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Even if most of the ethnic Kurds engaged in heroin trafficking now live outside Turkey, it is common knowledge that there are also powerful tribal chieftains in southeastern Turkey who are involved in the trade. Although the narcotics trade has undoubtedly helped finance the PKK, there is considerable evidence that, in return for supporting the Turkish state’s war against the PKK – such as through the provision of recruits to the state-sponsored militia known as Village Guards – the Turkish authorities have sometimes been prepared to overlook the illegal activities of some of the tribal chieftains in the predominantly Kurdish southeast of Turkey. One known heroin trafficker even served as a member of parliament in the 1990s, not only for parties of the center-right but also for the Islamist Welfare Party (RP), trading his ability to deliver the political support of his tribe in return for de facto immunity from prosecution.
US sanctions PKK
But US President George W. Bush may not agree. On May 30, he used an anti-drug trafficking law to prevent US companies and individuals from doing business with the PKK.
“This action underscores the president's determination to do everything possible to pursue drug traffickers, undermine their operations and end the suffering that trade in illicit drugs inflicts on Americans and other people around the world, as well as prevent drug traffickers from supporting terrorists,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said in a statement.
The PKK has used a remote part of Iraq's largely autonomous region of Kurdistan as a base to stage attacks inside Turkey in pursuit of its goal of a Kurdish homeland in southeastern Turkey. The Turkish military this year has regularly crossed the border into northern Iraq to attack PKK forces.
There’s no mention in the article of problematic drug trafficking by the PKK, but they were still designated under the heavy-duty sounding Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act – along with a motley crew of Italians, Mexicans, an Afghan, a Venezuelan and a Turk.
The Italian crime group sanctioned, the ‘Ndrangheta organization, apparently leapfrogged the Sicilian Mafia in the 1990s to become Italy’s largest drug trafficking group and has spread much further than Italy’s borders.
One of the Mexican men listed is one of several brothers leading a faction of the Sinaloa cartel in the marijuana-producing state of the same name on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Violence in the state has gone through the roof this year – with around 300 people dead – as the brothers and Mexico’s most-wanted man, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, vie for control over the cartel. Most recently, thousands of federal troops entered the Sinaloa capital of Culiacan in mid-May to fight Shorty’s drug cartel.
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