The Proxy Platform

While governments and citizens of Eastern Europe were struggling with the recent financial crisis and trying to borrow money from international financial institutions, billions of euros circulated in the region in an illegal, parallel system that enriched organized crime figures and corrupt politicians.

GO TO PROJECT

Documents show that Energoinvest lost out on millions of KM because of the suspect way it went about trying to recover long-standing debts.

By The Center for Investigative Reporting

Patience can pay.

Big Trouble at Big Tobacco

Executives of Japan Tobacco International (JTI) stood by as its distributors engaged in widespread cigarette smuggling in a dozen countries, according to company records, e-mails, secretly recorded conversations by investigators, and interviews with a half-dozen past employees.
When the company’s anti-smuggling unit cracked down on smuggling routes and raised questions about suspect distributors, JTI retaliated last year by hacking into the team’s computers, firing its leaders, and phasing out nearly a dozen contractors who knew about the smuggling, according to former employees.

GO TO PROJECT PROJECT UPDATE

By Stevan Dojcinovic and Valerie Hopkins

The Serbian Special Court for the Fight Against Organized Crime today sentenced Serbian businessman Stanko Subotic to six years in prison for abuse of office for overseeing his company’s smuggling of cigarettes into Serbia from Macedonia and Hungary.  The court sentenced Subotic’s nephew, Nikola Milosevic, to four-and-a-half years behind bars and former director of the Federal Customs Administration Mihalj Kertes to four years both for aiding and abetting the abuse of office.

Eleven other accomplices received shorter sentences ranging between 10 months and three and a half years.  Two of the suspected associates were acquitted.

According to the verdict, Subotic, his employees, and complicit state authorities used MIA, a company he set up in 1991, to illegally earn €33.6 million through smuggling cigarettes in 1995 and 1996.

Although both the indictment and verdict detail Subotic’s cigarette smuggling operations, he and his associates were actually tried and convicted of abusing their positions in a private company under a seldom used law dating from Serbia’s days as a constituent republic of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.  While the verdict says that Subotic and his group are guilty  of “abusing their positions in a private company to smuggle cigarettes,” they were not directly convicted of the crime of smuggling cigarettes.  The distinction will likely save Subotic a future extradition or problems in other countries because no country recognizes such a charge.

A series of stories documenting offshore tax havens, the criminals who use them and the millions of dollars in lost tax money has been awarded the top prize by the The International Consortium for Investigative Journalists.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project assembled a team of reporters throughout Eastern Europe and the United States to track the burgeoning network of offshore companies used to hide ownership and assets, launder money and create secret businesses that elude law enforcement agents worldwide.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has named the OCCRP a finalist for its prestigious Daniel Pearl Award.

ICIJ Judges announced Thursday that Offshore Crime, Inc., has been named as one of seven finalists for the award.

Offshore Crime, Inc. was the product a six month investigation into how organized criminal groups use offshore tax havens to launder money, hide assets, and evade taxes.    OCCRP reporters investigated offshore tax havens including the U.S. state of Delaware, the Cayman Islands, Seychelles,  New Zealand, Romania and Ukraine.