Around the world, some 3 million companies are registered in places and ways intended to make it hard for snooping law enforcement investigators. These...
The Balkans, a region synonymous with violence and crime during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the transition from communism, is now one of the safest...
CCBlog by Beth Kampschror
Find out the latest news and gossip on crime and corruption in our CCBlog feature.
Prosecutors at the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) are believed to have recommended filing bribery charges against Serbian businessman Vuk Hamovic, but have been denied permission to file those charges for five months, according to a story in the Guardian newspaper.
The police in Trebinje confiscated large quantities of cigarettes in 2006 and 2007. Reports were submitted to prosecutors against individuals who had the cigarettes.
In the Balkans, death and cigarettes are closely related.But it's not always the carcinogens that are the problem. The illegal tobacco trade takes its share of lives.
Despite the efforts of the EU, law enforcement and others, BiH continues to be a transshipment point for illegal tobacco. The state budget loses hundreds of millions of KM every year because of cigarette smuggling.
The growth of online trade websites like Alibab.com has made it possible for just about anyone on earth to become a tobacco smuggler from the comfort of their own home.
Tobacco is staining the Balkans While much of Western Europe and the US try to rid their public places of cigarettes and keep children away from tobacco, Southeast Europeans continue to puff away at some of the highest tobacco-use rates in the world.Up to 50 percent of the population in some parts of the region smoke.
The massive public health problems that will arise from this are not surprising, as the adverse health effects of tobacco are well documented.But in other places around the world, the tobacco industry at least provides the beneficial offsets of plentiful tax revenues, jobs and regional trade.This is not the case, however, in Southeast Europe, where smuggling and corruption cancel even those benefits while at the same time enriching organized crime and corrupt politicians......
Throughout southeast Europe, the lights are going off. In Romania alone, about 300,000 households were disconnected for non-payment of bills last year. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, whole villages isolated since a war in the early 1990s can't get reconnected. These are the region's poorest people. They include pensioners who worked for years during communism but now survive on pensions so meager that electricity eats up one-third of their check; Roma citizens who survived on illegal hookups for years and now face a future of no light; and the rural poor who survive in remote regions and do not have the money to connect to the grid.
On the other side are state companies whose governments have agreed to liberalize the region's energy markets. Yet many of them are burdened by massive debt from years of political misuse, infrastructures not ready for the new realities and competition in the form of nimbler and more liquid energy traders.
In between are the energy traders. They say they are the future of low-cost energy but that is a promise yet to be fulfilled. These politically connected and well-financed businessmen have reaped billions in sales, often at the expense of state companies. Investigators in a number of countries are trying to determine whether some of them made their millions in profits illegally or legally in systems that have few laws and not enough regulations.
Reporters from Albania , Bosnia-Herzegovina , Bulgaria and Romania looked at the regional energy market and energy traders. What they found was a murky, closed system that is not open to fair trade and where the state companies are giving away their advantage to well-connected energy traders.
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