At the UN last week, reported Reuters:
Kosovo accused
Serbia, in response, said an "ethnic-Albanian mafia" was involved in human trafficking, arms-smuggling and drugs.
Neither Kosovo Foreign Minister Skender Hyseni nor Serbian President Boris Tadić managed to acknowledge either of their own shortcomings on Kosovo organized crime. Hyseni said the “lawlessness” in the north was a concern, never mentioning the strength of Albanian-dominated organized crime throughout the province. Tadić blamed the Albanian narco-mafia, declining to note that his own people were recently busted for smuggling in the north.
Also last week,
Chechen Killed in
In the fourth murder of a prominent Chechen in six months, an opponent of the pro-Russian Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov was killed in Dubai last weekend.
Sulim Yamadayev, 36, was shot in the underground parking lot of a luxury residential complex in
The Daily Telegraph had more:
While there were contradictory details about the killing, experts on
Coming only six months after Mr Yamadayev's brother, Ruslan, was shot dead outside the British embassy in central Moscow, the murder is another sign that Chechnya's increasingly bloody gangland war is being fought beyond the Russian republic's borders…
Questions are now being asked in
Aside from the Yamadayev brothers, those murdered since September included Umar Israilov, a former bodyguard for Kadyrov who had accused him of torture. He was shot dead on a street in Vienna in January. Last month, a former deputy mayor of the Chechen capital Grozny was shot dead in Moscow. A Russian lawyer who had represented the family of a Chechen woman murdered by a Russian army officer was also shot dead in Moscow earlier this year.
While speculation is rife that Kadyrov, if not the Kremlin, has something to do with the string of murders, Kadyrov and his Moscow-backed government have denied any connection to the killings.
Yamadayev’s murder came as Russia is thinking about loosening curfews, roadblocks and searches in Chechnya, citing improved security under Kadyrov, who has subdued the large-scale rebel resistance.
Forbes:
The Central Asian nation of
President Kurmanbek Bakiyev faces mounting opposition inside the central Asian country, brought to a fevered pitch by recent allegations that his administration organized the assassination of a former administration official.
Lax enforcement of anti-corruption rules plagues this nation, which shares a border with
Banking Scandal Hits
Authorities in
The prosecutor’s office has since released more details of the suspected crimes, alleging that from 2005 to 2008 Ablyazov and colleagues stole BTA funds by issuing fictitious credits worth at least $1 billion to firms they privately controlled. A prosecutor’s office official said March 24 that Ablyazov, Zharimbetov and others were suspected of being part of an organized crime ring, begging the question of how a mafia-style group could have operated at the country’s top bank for so long. Ablyazov fled abroad immediately after BTA’s nationalization, accusing the government of "corporate raiding" and later describing the charges against him as "baseless and politically motivated."
Corruption cases in Armenia more than doubled last year, according to the head of the country’s organized crime directorate.
Police recorded 392 so-called corruption crimes in 2008, up from 171 such cases in 2007, Col. Hunan Poghosian told a news conference. Many of these cases – more than one third – were crime related to tax evasion, but more than 130 others involved bribery, abuse of power and the embezzlement of public funds. Police solved about 30 bribery cases in 2008, up from just two the year before.
Poghosian said the sharp rise (in corruption cases) reflects not only increased government corruption but also better crime registration and greater government attention to the problem. He claimed that the fight against graft and bribery in particular has become the main focus of the work of his police unit.