Organized Crime and Coruption Project

Authorities are trying to find out whether two Serbian gangsters convicted of aiding with the 2003 murder of the country’s prime minister are connected to the Serbian government and/or other major regional crime groups.

By Beth Kampschror

One of the men, Milos Simovic, was arrested by Serbian police earlier this month as he tried to enter the country from Croatia. The other man, Sretko Kalinic, remains in a Zagreb hospital after allegedly being shot by Simovic. Both men, members of the once-powerful Zemun Clan, were tried in absentia for the 2003 murder of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic and sentenced to 30 years. They were also sentenced to an additional 40 years for their roles in nearly 20 other murders.

The authorities are trying to find out why the men were able to hide in Croatia for so long, said Justice Ministry state secretary Slobodan Homen:

The state secretary  said that it “did not make sense” that the pair of Zemun gangsters spent the last seven years hiding, with the wife of one of them occasionally taking them “a hundred or two hundred euros, without being monitored by police”.

“It's far more logical that the information we got from the underground is accurate – that they were doing jobs and were financed by other criminal groups,“ said Homen.

According to him, it is also important to find out whether the pair “had support from someone inside the government”.

“Unfortunately, our priority was solving the murder of our prime minister and I think that it's in every government's interest to investigate that to the end. That's exactly why their testimonies could be interesting, to see who was helping them, who was cooperating and if it leads to the representatives of authority from the time when the investigation slowed down, I think that would be the right path and the right message,“ the state secretary pointed out.

Though it seemed doubtful earlier this month that Croatia would extradite the wounded Kalinic to Serbia – Kalinic is a Croatian citizen, and the two countries have for years refused to extradite their citizens to each other’s courts – a Serbian news agency reported last week that the countries will sign an extradition treaty. The treaty, according to the Beta agency, will cover only suspects accused of corruption and organized crime (the touchy subject of war-crimes suspects was apparently not covered). The two countries could sign it as soon as June 28, the agency reported. Here’s hoping the agreement is signed – an extradition agreement like this would show that fighting regional crime is beginning to trump wartime resentments, at least officially. And it might help add some truth to last week’s hyperbolic statements from Serbian prosecutors about regional mafias being weaker than ever.

Also in Serbia last week, a former president of the legendary football club Red Star Belgrade was indicted for abuse of office and embezzling money from player transfers. Three other former club officials were also indicted in the case. Prosecutors did not say which transfers had been affected, nor did they indicate how much money the suspects allegedly embezzled.

In other news from eastern and southeastern Europe:

• In a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, Slovakia’s justice ministry last week sent Belgrade an extradition request for a suspected Kosovar Albanian heroin smuggler, as Slovakia doesn’t recognize an independent Kosovo. Slovakia’s foreign ministry has recommended the request be sent to the EU rule-of-law mission in Kosovo. Slovakia’s interest in the suspect, who holds a Slovakian passport, stems from his alleged smuggling of 120 kilos of heroin in a half-dozen shipments over two years. He left Slovakia on a “business trip” on March 15, apparently just as police were readying to raid his house.
• A Sofia court’s recent acquittal of two men thought to be Bulgaria’s two biggest organized crime figures has dashed any hopes Bulgarians might have had for changes, said the country’s interior minister last week. Krasimir and Nikolaj Marinov – the latter of whom was tried in absentia after he disappeared – were acquitted of plotting three murders earlier this month. Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said the courts have yet to be reformed and are therefore to blame for the acquittals.
• Deutsche Welle covered OCCRP’s series on southeast Europe’s private security firms, which have played a major role in expanding organized crime in the region. The full series, “Security Chaos,” can be found here.

International

The United Nation’s drugs office last week released the first-ever review of transnational organized crime’s threats to world security. The office’s head, Antonio Maria Costa, urged the UN General Assembly to make a coordinated global effort to follow the money through anti-money laundering and anti-corruption measures:

The study shows that organized crime is making "billions of dollars a year from the trafficking of drugs, guns, people, natural resources, counterfeit products, as well as maritime piracy and cyber crime," he added.

UNODC conducted the survey after UN member states and international organizations expressed alarm about the threat posed by transnational organized crime and stressed the need to combat it.

Costa said that a more effective fight against the crime syndicates requires shifting "focus from disrupting the mafias to disrupting their markets" through tighter measures to combat money laundering and corruption.

He also suggested cracking down on the accomplices of crime "like the army of white-collar criminals -- lawyers, accountants, realtors and bankers who cover up and launder their proceeds."

Similar connections were made last week in the US, as a major justice conference gathered high-ranking officials who noted that corruption and transnational organized crime can’t really live without each other. Main Justice, the website that covers the US Justice Department, quoted Lisa Holtyn, senior intelligence advisor in the criminal division’s organized crime section:

“In terms of actual threats that we identified…the top threat was international organized crime infiltration into state institutions,” Holtyn said. “What we mean by this is everything from co-opting state leaders, paying bribes and having them in their pockets… to maybe states where there are weak governments and these groups have been allowed to flourish because of the lack of rule of law.”

Holtyn also said that public corruption allowed organized crime to infiltrate economic and commercial markets, which threatened both the markets and legitimate businesses seeking entrance to those markets that were not using “underhanded” business tactics.

“They may use bribery, fraud and violence and other things that will allow them to gain the upper hand and cause legitimate businesses to lose market share,” Holtyn said.

Main Justice also reported last week that the US and the UK will share unprecedented amounts of intelligence to fight international organized crime. The site noted that the move could have a serious impact on global anti-corruption initiatives as well.

Now if only the UN itself would lend a hand. Its task force that investigated malfeasance around UN procurement contracts lived an incredibly short life – from 2006, in the wake of the oil-for-food scandal, until the end of 2008. The AP got a hold of the task force’s last report, and it is a doozy:

A December 2008 report by the now-disbanded U.N. Procurement Task Force says former officials Ventzislav Stoykov and Edgar Casals each scammed hundreds of thousands of dollars and ran outside ventures at the U.N.'s Economic Commission for Africa.

The report obtained by The Associated Press says Stoykov manipulated bids and cut private deals with U.N. contractors he oversaw, while Casals forged birth certificates to get U.N. child support and used an American official to get U.S. visas for others — a potential security risk. Both men have denied the allegations.

As one of the last big investigations the anti-corruption task force completed before it was forced to shutter its operations at the end of 2008, the case illustrates the limits of the U.N.'s self-policing — which has seriously eroded in the past year and a half — and its secrecy and bureaucracy in handling major cases of fraud and corruption.

"Investigations have been hampered and significantly slowed by the lack of cooperation of some parties, including vendors external to the organization, certain counsel for staff and vendors, and staff members themselves," the task force says in its 131-page report.

The AP reported on the UN’s sorry self-policing earlier this year, but it noted in this latest story that the UN has still failed to permanently appoint someone to head its investigation division, and that 175 leftover cases have been closed or left dangling since the beginning of 2009.