Medvedev has made stamping out corruption a priority since taking office one year ago. The AP story on this most recent development was less than glowing – it said the push has met with little progress and that:
Last month, Medvedev attempted to lead by example by disclosing his income voluntarily. Since then all government ministers — including Prime Minister Vladimir Putin — have submitted income statements to be made public.
Observers noted that many of the statements appeared incomplete, with expensive acquisitions by often unemployed spouses left unexplained.
Also in
Nekrasov, founder of Arbat Prestige, once
The trial is slated to begin June 1.
Dooney & Bourke Co-Founder Faces Trial in Bribes
Another trial slated for June 1 will see an American man face trial for helping the so-called “Pirate of Prague” bribe Azerbaijani government leaders in the failed bid to take over that country’s state-owned oil company. Frederic Bourke, a Connecticut-based entrepreneur who co-founded the purse maker Dooney & Bourke, denies knowing of a bribery scheme when he invested $8 million with the Czech-born businessman Viktor Kozeny. Bloomberg has the background:
Kozeny now lives in the
Like Kozeny’s antics in the
Former
First it was the BBC’s report on Croatian organized crime that had the Croatian government and media in an uproar. Last week it was a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Croatian corruption.
The op-ed, written by the co-founders of the Adriatic Institute for Public Policy (a Croatia-based think tank), merely points out what Balkan-watchers have known for a long time: That Croatia is not the gleaming model of Europeanization that the European Commission seems to think it is. The article lists the usual suspects – corrupt politicians, criminals-cum-businessmen – and talks about drugs, weapons and human smuggling along the Balkan Route. It points out that
Speaking of corruption, three managers of Croatia’s privatization agency were convicted week before last of fixing sales of state-owned property in exchange for hefty bribes. The former Croatian Privatization Fund vice-president Josip Matanovic was sentenced to 11 years in prison and ordered to pay €270,000 he had received in bribes in exchange for arranging the sales of state-owned property.
In
Also last week, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime signed a memorandum with the Regional Cooperation Council aimed to fight transnational organized crime in southeastern
A high court in
Since the court’s inauguration in 2005, according to the Slovak Spectator, it has
…sentenced one former mayor to five years for receiving bribes, a football referee for three years over corruption, put the boss of the eastern Slovak underworld behind bars for the rest of his life, and heard the case of the acid-bath gang – as its name suggests, one of the country’s most brutal criminal affairs…
The Spectator reported that no serious-thinking observers – particularly potential foreign investors – would celebrate the court’s verdict, which will shut the special court down.
Activists lobby US on Banking Due Diligence
The US government should require banks to identify not only the real owner of money in a bank account, but to have strong evidence that the money is not the proceeds of corruption, the head of a non-profit public policy group told a Congressional committee last week.
Global Witness investigator Anthea Lawson explained GW’s recent findings on how banks help corrupt leaders when they siphon money from their countries’ oil, timber and diamond companies to the House Financial Service Committee. The report named and shamed major banks – including Barclays, Fortis, Citibank and Deutsche Bank – for doing business with corrupt leaders worldwide. The full testimony can be found here.
Worldwide Actions Bring in Italian Mobsters
More than 70 alleged members of the Naples-based Camorra were arrested last week in one of the largest Italian police operations in years. The raids in the
Also last week, Brazilian authorities arrested a Sicilian mob boss’s son who had been living in Brazil under an assumed name for 15 years. Brazilian police said that 25 other suspects had been arrested in the same multinational fraud sting in
In corruption news, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi faced calls for his resignation last week after a judge ruled that a British tax lawyer had given false testimony to protect Berlusconi during two separate corruption trials.
…the judges said they had concluded that Mills was guilty because the evidence showed that he had given false testimony in two trials in 1997 and 1998 to shield Mr Berlusconi and his Fininvest company from charges relating to the purchase of US film rights, and to “protect Berlusconi’s economic interests”.
They said that Mills had accepted a bribe of $600,000 (£388,000) to act “as a false witness” and “to allow Silvio Berlusconi and his Fininvest group impunity from the charges or, at least, to keep their huge profits”.
Berlusconi called the verdict “outrageous” and said he would appear before Parliament to clear his name.
