Organized Crime and Coruption Project

A Croatian member of a once-powerful mob group based in neighboring Serbia may soon be the first Croatian citizen to be extradited , as per a Croatian extra-procedural council ruling last week. Sretko Kalinic, who faces decades in prison has indicated that he won’t appeal the ruling. Serbian radio-television B92 had the background:

Kalinić, sentenced in absentia to a total of 70 years in prison, was a fugitive for seven years and was hiding in Croatia when another Zemun Clan crime group member, Miloš Simović, shot and wounded him.

By Beth Kampschror

Both were convicted for their involvement in the murder of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić in March 2003. Sretko Kalinić was sentenced to 30 years in prison for this crime, and 40 years for 19 other murders, as well as kidnappings and acts of terrorism.

The two countries earlier this summer signed an historic extradition treaty that covers suspects wanted for organized crime and/or corruption – a signal that Croatia and Serbia are willing to put at least some of the wartime bad blood behind them. (War crimes suspects’ extraditions is still off the table.) Serbian Justice Minister Snezana Malovic said last week that Serbia is planning similar extradition treaties with neighbors Macedonia and Montenegro, as well as with the US.

In other organized crime news from the region, a group of Serbian tourists told a Belgrade newspaper last week that they had spotted the country’s most-wanted cocaine smuggling suspect in northern Montenegro. Apparently fugitive Darko Saric, who’s wanted for attempting to smuggle several tons of cocaine from South America to the Balkans, is not the most conscientious of drivers:

"He realized we had recognized him, and instantly rolled up the window of his luxury vehicle and ran a red light to speed toward Šavnik," one of the tourists was quoted as saying.

Serbia and Montenegro have been arguing for months over Saric’s whereabouts – he was born in Montenegro, but  managed to get a Serbian passport during the last decade. Serbia maintains that Saric is in Montenegro; Montenegro hotly denies this and says that Saric is elsewhere in Europe. This news is unlikely to sweeten relations between the two countries.

News from further south

Bulgarian authorities last week ran yet another snazzily titled operation against organized crime, this one called “The Armorers,” targeting illicit arms makers who apparently sold various weapons to Bulgarian crime groups. Three people were arrested, according to an interview that Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov gave to Focus news agency:

FOCUS: For how long have these people been dealing with illegal arms trade?
Tsvetan Tsvetanov: We have been investigating these people for three months. My colleagues have worked three months to bust the entire arms trading scheme. Large amount of weapons – carbines, assault rifles, handguns, grenades and etc. have been seized from the headquarters of the criminals in the district of Kazanlak and on the territory of Sofia, as well as in the district of Plovdiv. This means that the scheme should have been operating from a long time.

Raids like this aside, the fallout continues over a Bulgarian court’s recent decision to release several suspects arrested in an earlier raid, code-named “The Killers.” The government has accused the judiciary of being corrupt, or in collusion with the suspects, who had allegedly plotted to assassinate the country’s prime minister. The judiciary maintains that the police raids are more geared towards impressing the European Union – which has harshly criticized and punished the country for not cracking down on organized crime – than they are towards gathering evidence that can hold up in court.

And in Romania, the local director of a Dutch-owned bank was arrested last week and charged with embezzlement, among other things. Police told the AP that bank employees had taken more than €2 million from around 20 savings accounts without authorization.

Int’l: UN head defends his record

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon defended his corruption fighting record last week, and called the recent public criticism from two senior UN officials about the workings – or lack thereof – of the UN’s internal watchdog “unfair.”

"If anybody, or any member state within the U.N. system, or any colleague of mine in the U.N. secretariat accuses me on the issue of accountability, or ethics, then I regard it as unfair. It was I who have taken this accountability, and the highest standard of ethics by the U.N. secretariat has been held from day one," Ban said.

"And I have made much progress, again, unprecedented progress. It was I who have established for the first time an ethics office in the U.N. system. Can you believe it?" he told reporters.

The Associated Press, which has reported extensively on the problems with the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Service (OIOS), promptly pointed out that Ban’s ethics office was, in fact, established in 2006 by Ban’s predecessor, Kofi Annan. And while earlier this summer, a top OIOS official’s blistering 50-page memo about Ban’s handling of the OIOS was leaked to the press, the AP recently reported on another official’s grievances:

The AP reported last week that an American prosecutor, Robert Appleton, filed a 76-page grievance accusing Ban of blocking his hiring to the U.N.'s top investigative post because of discrimination based on gender and nationality. Appleton headed the U.N.'s special white collar fraud unit, known as the Procurement Task Force, from 2006 to 2008.

While Appleton's grievance before the U.N. Dispute Tribunal focuses on Ban's hiring practices, which he calls a breach of U.N. Charter and General Assembly resolutions, the claims more broadly add to the questions raised about Ban's record battling internal fraud.

Appleton wrote that Ban and other senior officials "are avoiding their own accountability for a system that is dysfunctional" and said the failing of the Ban administration toward OIOS "calls into question the respect these high ranking officials have for the most basic principles of the organization, and the fundamental rule of law."

Further east

Russians in a recent poll gave Prime Minister Vladimir Putin a lackluster scorecard on his attempts to fight corruption, with some 37 percent of those polled saying that his anti-corruption efforts were the least successful of his initiatives. Putin’s general ratings, however, were high in this poll of 1600 Russians: More than half – 59 percent – said that Putin was doing a good job sorting out Russia’s problems.