Talking trash

Reuters reported Friday that Italy’s outgoing environment minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio is under investigation for allegedly accepting freebies from companies involved in rubbish removal in Naples. Reports in Italy’s main newspapers, including the daily Corriere della Sera, said that prosecutors intercepted several phone calls in the southern town of Potenza – conversations in which employees of a travel agency talked about several of the minister’s holiday travel and accommodation arrangements.

This sounded initially innocuous; the dailies, however, went on to say:

The Visetur travel agency, which has been awarded contracts for organizing several of Pecoraro Scanio's official visits, arranged the minister's stay in a luxury hotel in Milan over the Christmas holidays, the Corriere della Sera daily said. The minister's Milan hotel bill was allegedly picked up by Visetur, while several private trips abroad made by the minister were allegedly paid by businessmen who late last year wanted to tender for a contract to transport rubbish from Naples to a incinerator owned by them in Greece. The tender contract was never awarded, Corriere della Sera said.

A court in the same southern town is investigating Scanio, one of his aides, a local travel agent and a former magistrate over the alleged exchange of free travel and hotels for Scanio’s help in securing waste disposal contracts for local companies.

Scanio’s spokesman has denied the allegations, saying that the minister found out about the scandal only by reading the newspapers on Friday. The spokesman also noted that the timing of the announced investigation was “convenient,” coming as it does just around a week before parliamentary elections on April 13-14. Scanio is running as a member of Left Rainbow, a coalition of Communists and Greens.

Scanio, 49, is already a member of outgoing Romano Prodi's centre-left government, which collapsed in January. He has faced numerous calls for his resignation since trash started to pile up in and around Naples late in December 2007. Dumps and landfills in the region are full. Meanwhile, local residents exhibiting the NIMBY (not in my backyard) factor oppose the opening of new dumps; environmental groups have opposed building new incinerators. Lacking a long-term plan, the local government has been able only to stagger from crisis to crisis. Exacerbating matters, reports ABC News, is the influence of the Mafia.

Allegations that the Mafia, known locally as the Camorra, is actively involved in illicit waste removal are being investigated. They reportedly have illegally disposed of toxic waste polluting the land and water supply. The rubbish collection industry is an $8.6 million industry. According to some convicted mobsters that have "sung" to the authorities, the Camorra has switched from pushing drugs to disposing of trash because it is more lucrative.

Bulgarian government accused of ties to organized crime
Opposition parties in Bulgaria’s parliament on April 3 accused the government of ties to organized crime, and called a vote of no confidence in the Socialist-led government – for the fifth time since the coalition took office in 2005. The reason? “Ties to organized crime,” reads the motion, signed by lawmakers from all Bulgaria’s opposition parties.

The move came after two senior police officials were arrested in the same week at the end of March. One, the deputy director of the Bulgarian organized crime division, Ivan Ivanov, was charged with revealing state secrets to crime bosses. The other, the former chief secretary of the Interior Ministry, had been forced to resign at the end of 2007 over a scandal involving an alleged Montenegrin drug dealer who had received a residency permit in Bulgaria despite being subject to a 10-year ban. The former chief secretary was arrested last month for overstepping his authority by sanctioning the wiretapping of the above-mentioned Mr Ivanov.

The opposition has demanded that Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev fire his interior minister, Rumen Petkov, in the wake of the scandal; Stanishev gave his minister 10 days to purge the police force of officers found to have criminal ties.

Those measures, however, will not help the black eye Bulgaria has suffered in the European Union in recent weeks. The 27-nation bloc has long admonished its newest member to clean up its act viz. corruption and organized crime; it was therefore just an instance of Murphy’s Law that the two arrests took place mere days before a visit from European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso. His comments in the International Herald Tribune during the visit did not sound cheerful.

“It remains a source of frustration that some Bulgarians are undermining the reform process," Barroso said. He said that corruption and organized crime cannot be tolerated in the European Union and added that what really mattered was the attitude of the authorities. "It is a matter of public attitude that those who break the law cannot put themselves above the law," Barroso said. After a corruption scandal in Bulgaria's road agency, Brussels last month suspended EU subsidy payments for infrastructure, and demanded financial records before it would consider lifting the ban. The European Commission has repeatedly pointed out Bulgaria's inability to root out rampant corruption, curb organized crime and put criminals behind bars.


The Socialist government, however, has 151 deputies in the 240-member parliament, and is expected to survive the vote of no confidence.

Albanian officials deny involvement in arms trade
The fallout continues in Albania over a New York Times article that, among other things, described ammunition sales from Albania’s cobwebbed stockpiles that had more than a whiff of corruption about them.

The article, published on March 27, described how, since the Afghan insurgency picked up pace in 2006, the American military had been relying on an inexperienced Miami Beach company, AEY, Inc., whose vice-president was a 25-year-old masseur, to arm the Afghan military and police. The article estimated that the company’s contracts have likely totaled up to a third of a billion dollars, and discussed AEY’s purchases of antiquated, inaccurate ammunition from the countries of the former Communist bloc – ammunition that in many cases the US government paid to have de-commissioned.

But it was the Albania section that has got officials there up in (ahem) arms. The company’s 22-year-old president Efraim Diveroli had been secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million rounds of aging ammunition in Albania – most of it originally supplied by China in the 1960s and 1970s. In dealing with the Albanians, Diveroli’s company had to buy ammunition from a middleman registered in Cyprus, Evdin Ltd. Diveroli’s local packing agent, a businessman named Kosta Trebicka, reckoned that the reason for the middleman was to divert money to Albanian officials: The Albanian government sold ammunition to Evdin for $22 per 1,000 rounds. Evdin sold the ammunition to AEY for considerably more (the NYT did not go into details), and government officials shared the difference. Those enriched by the diversion, thought Trebicka, included Ylli Pinari, the head of the arms export agency and the then defense minister.

On June 11, 2007, Mr. Trebicka and Mr. Diveroli commiserated by phone about problems with doing business in Albania. Mr. Trebicka surreptitiously recorded the conversation, and later gave the audio files to American investigators.
The conversation, he said, showed that the American company was aware of corruption in its dealings in Albania and that Heinrich Thomet, a Swiss arms dealer, was behind Evdin.
In the recordings, which Mr. Trebicka shared with The Times, Mr. Diveroli suggests that Mr. Thomet, called “Henri,” was acting as the middleman.
“Pinari needs a guy like Henri in the middle to take care of him and his buddies, which is none of my business,” Mr. Diveroli said. “I don’t want to know about that business. I want to know about legitimate businesses.”
Mr. Diveroli recommended that Mr. Trebicka try to reclaim his contract by sending “one of his girls” to have sex with Mr. Pinari. He suggested that money might help, too.
“Let’s get him happy; maybe he gives you one more chance,” he said. “If he gets $20,000 from you ... ”
At the end, Mr. Diveroli appeared to lament his business with Albania. “It went up higher to the prime minister and his son,” he said. “I can’t fight this mafia. It got too big. The animals just got too out of control.”

PM Berisha’s spokeswoman issued his denial in a press release just one day after the article was printed. Albania’s ambassador to the United Nations was one of the first to react in print. “The government of Albania is gung-ho in its fight against corruption and is fully committed to helping NATO in Afghanistan,” wrote Adrian Neritani in the NYT’s Letters section on April 2.

We were frankly surprised by the publication of unsubstantiated corruption allegations. The only evidence is a secret tape between two shadowy and self-interested arms dealers, hardly reliable sources. We rebutted allegations on the tape; neither the prime minister nor his son is involved with the procurement process of any ministry, including Albania’s Ministry of Defense.

The government says they are investigating the corruption allegations. No word on whose heads could roll if they are found to be true, as neither Mr Pinari nor the then-defense minister are at their posts any longer – Pinari was fired and the minister resigned after an enormous explosion at a military base outside the capital on March 15.

What’s wrong with Serbia
And then there’s the European Stability Initiative’s surprisingly intelligent and insightful report on Serbia. I say “surprisingly” because ESI was also once known for its ridicule of the former outside world’s governor-general in Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown (2002-2005), and advocating instead a hands-off approach to the Bosnians, Bosnian nationalism, and particularly Bosnian organized crime and corruption through more “local ownership” over Bosnia’s state court, and institutions in general. ESI had its come-uppance when a former member of its board of directors, Christian Schwarz-Schilling, took over Ashdown’s post in 2005, and by all reckonings did a disastrous job. The new report, “What’s wrong with Serbia,” discusses, well, what’s wrong with Serbia – why it appears to be “on the fast track towards isolation, and even renewed conflict over Kosovo.” Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, notes the report, was a criminal regime whose security services were involved not only in war crimes, but also classic forms of organized crime: drug trafficking, extortion, kidnappings and targeted assassinations. These shadowy security services not only survived Milosevic’s fall, but have also so far survived the past eight years of democratic governments, and look likely to survive longer.

It helps that the report was penned by the region’s best journalist and expert on what goes on behind the scenes in the Serbian military, paramilitaries and police: Mr Dejan Anastasijevic. Locally he writes for Vreme magazine in Serbia, and internationally strings for Time magazine. ESI should consider themselves lucky to have his voice of reason on board.

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