Organized Crime and Coruption Project

A suspected longtime Serbian crime boss was sentenced to 15 years in prison last week after a court found him guilty of ordering a 1995 murder. Sreten Jocic, known as “Joca Amsterdam,” could not have received the new criminal code’s maximum sentence of 40 years, as the new law stipulates that the court should weigh the old code and the new code, and hand down the more lenient of the two sentences. (Fifteen years is the maximum under the old law.)

By Beth Kampschror

The court found Jocic, 48, guilty of promising two gunmen that he would pay them to kill one of his underworld rivals.

Jocic has a long history in that underworld, beginning, as so many others did, in the country’s security services. According to our latest dossier, Interpol believes that Jocic is a drug kingpin with an empire that stretches from South America to the Balkans; he’s also suspected of involvement in several murders. Serbian authorities arrested Jocic in April 2009 on suspicion that he ordered the 2008 murder of a prominent Croatian editor. Jocic remains on trial for that crime.

The Jocic verdict wasn’t the only major crime-and-corruption news coming out of Serbia last week. In other news:

• The former defense minister of the country formerly known as Serbia and Montenegro was indicted for abuse of office over a satellite-rental contract with Israel that prosecutors say robbed Serbia of €45 million. The prosecution says it can prove that Prvoslav Davinic signed the contract without the agreement of state institutions. Davinic said he can prove that the indictment is not based in fact.
• The Anti-Corruption Council filed criminal charges against 17 people who allegedly cost the state at least €21 million by their involvement in the illegal takeover of the Port of Belgrade.
• Authorities arrested the former Serbian Railways director on suspicion that his involvement in buying diesel engines from Sweden and Slovenia cost the state €1.2 million.
• Police arrested 11 people suspected of running a sophisticated marijuana-growing operation in four northern Serbian towns. Police found 1,000 plants, Dutch equipment that aids in growing the plants, cash, vehicles and weapons during a raids.
• And speaking of weapons, the interior ministry seized nearly 400 illegal weapons in the first three months of this year, according to the Belgrade daily Politika. A criminology expert told the paper that there are three times as many illegal weapons as there are legally registered weapons in the country.

Serbia’s interior minister is en route to South America as of this writing, for a six-day, three-country tour in which he plans to sign anti-cocaine-trafficking agreements with police leaders there.

In other news from the neighborhood, the Pristina daily Express speculated over the weekend that some senior officials from Kosovo’s three major parties are likely to be arrested for corruption soon. The paper named no names, but said that the EU rule-of-law mission there – EULEX – was treating more than 100 cases seriously. The investigations cover not only the current government, but also every official since 2000, according to the paper. Prime Minister Hashim Thaci said as much on Sunday, reported Serbian radio-television B92:

Thaci said that there would be no compromise in the fight against corruption, mentioning those suspected of corruption in earlier Kosovo administrations as well.

“There are 111 officials in all of Kosovo’s institutions since 1999 until today that are suspected of being involved in corruption. All of these cases will be investigated,” Thaci said.

Apparently some of the major powers are looking askance at EULEX’s investigations, which have covered for example, a powerful transport minister whom EULEX has investigated for embezzlement. EULEX head Yves de Kermabon  was asked at a recent parliament committee session what he thought about US and other Western countries’ comments that these investigations could be bad for Kosovo’s stability. He said:

EULEX chief Yves de Kermabon said Brussels on Thursday that “nobody in Kosovo could be above the law.”

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Kermabon further stated that the role of EULEX in Kosovo was to ensure justice without interference, adding that he had no regard for any pressure.

Itt will be harder for him to back up that talk with action if he’s hobbled by a fractious European Union. Some countries back Kermabon, but others want to back off investigations for the sake of stability, and still other countries don’t even recognize Kosovo’s independence from Serbia. These EU disagreements are par for the course, and have been so viz the Balkans since at least 1991. The faraway tug-of-war in Brussels will no doubt have a great deal to do with who will and who won’t go to jail in Pristina.

Jail, no matter how unpleasant, is probably preferable to what Greece’s prime minister has said is in store for politicians who fail to end graft:

"If we do not put the country in order, if we do not create a sense of justice, if there is no respect for the law, they will chase all of us away with stones, and rightly so," he said in parliament.

The phrase has a particular resonance in a country where protesters routinely hurl stones and chunks of marble at police during anti-austerity rallies, scream that lawmakers are thieves and shout "Burn parliament."

US urges world to do more against corruption

China, India and Russia should join the anti-bribery convention that 31 other countries in the club of wealthy nations – the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – have signed on to, said US Attorney General Eric Holder at an OECD meeting in Paris last week. Holder seemed to be saying, “We’ve cracked down on bribery, and so can you,” as he noted that since 2004, the US has prosecuted 37 companies for foreign bribery and levied fines of more than $1.5 billion. More than 80 people have faced criminal charges. He also noted that perceptions of corruption are changing:

"A little over a decade ago, foreign bribery was not only legal in many countries; it was tax deductible. That has changed," Holder said. "When there are simultaneous corporate criminal resolutions on both sides of the Atlantic-- and press reports of coordinated corruption-related search warrants by law enforcement in different countries--the developments cannot be ignored by would- be criminals."

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"As long as [bribery] remains a tactic, paying large monetary penalties cannot be viewed by the business community as merely 'the cost of doing business.' The risk of heading to prison for bribery is real, from the boardroom to the warehouse," he said.

But the US is going to need some friends if it wants to fight foreign bribery, wrote a lawyer who specializes in the US statute – the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) – that prohibits such bribery.

For there to be true deterrence, the United States can't be the only jurisdiction enforcing anti-bribery laws. That would only take American companies out of the game and give corrupt companies overseas a competitive advantage. Other jurisdictions must enact and enforce their own laws. For example, Britain's Bribery Act of 2010 expands beyond the FCPA by criminalizing failure to prevent bribery and creating no exceptions for "facilitation payments." New agreements between the European Union and the United States make it easier to extradite individuals and share information.

But in key markets, while there is high-level recognition of problems, little change has followed. Greek President Andreas Papandreou said last December that his government was "riddled with corruption." The Chinese government revealed in December that China lost about $35 billion to fraud and corruption last year.

As the United States claims the moral right to pursue corruption around the world, we are obliged to remember that our own record is not beyond reproach. The Justice Department has been appropriately humble in this regard. As Lanny Breuer, chief of the Criminal Division, said when discussing rule-of-law promotion and sustainable partnership: "Whether they be problems of corruption, organized crime or narcotics, we must be candid that we ... still have these issues in the United States as well."

Italy: Mob trash biz was brisk in ‘09

Trash disposal and illegal dumping remained good business for Italian organized crime groups last year, though every other business suffered in the recession, reported environmental group Legambiente last week.

Circumventing environmental regulations is "the only business that is immune from crises," Legambiente said in a statement, estimating the crime syndicates' turnover in 2009 at 20.5 billion euros (24.5 billion dollars), virtually unchanged compared to 2008.

"The environmental mafia proves again to be solid and powerful holding," said Legambiente President Vittorio Cogliati Dezza.

The biggest growth in revenues (from 3.9 to 5.2 billion euros) came from the handling and disposal of trash, such as spent computer parts which were sent to Africa or East Asia.

The Naples area, where the Camorra mob is based, was once again the main geographical concentration of the trash and dumping businesses.