Suspected Panther busted in Rome

By Beth Kampschror

Interpol, which created a Pink Panthers task force in 2007, chalked the arrest up to international police cooperation:

“This arrest, which comes less than two weeks after that of another Pink Panthers member in Montenegro, clearly shows the effective work being done by police investigating this gang of armed robbers, and particularly by the police in Montenegro and Italy in this case,” said Jean-Michel Louboutin, INTERPOL’s Executive Director of Police Services.

“These successes are due to the willingness of law enforcement to work together, and are a reflection on the hard work and professionalism of all the officers involved.

“It is clear that as the amount of information shared with INTERPOL and its network of 188 member countries increases, so too is the number of Pink Panther members being located, identified and arrested,” added Mr Louboutin.

David Samuels, who wrote about the Panthers for the New Yorker in April, wrote last week that Jelusic’s arrest seemed to be the result of both good police work and pressure from other Interpol members on Italy. He also offered some background on the Tokyo robbery:

The most audacious crime that Jelusic is thought to have perpetrated was the June 14, 2007, robbery of the Exelco Diamond store in Tokyo’s Ginza district. Footage of the robbery, which took thirty seconds to complete, shows two men, believed by Japanese police to be Jelusic and his fellow Montenegrin Rifat Hadziahmetovic, entering the store and spraying three female clerks with tear gas before escaping with a diamond tiara and a necklace worth eighty-four million yen (nine hundred thousand dollars).

Using false Czech passports, the two men left on separate flights from Narita Airport to France.

The two Panthers soon became the focus of a global intelligence-gathering and surveillance operation run by the Tokyo police, who had already been embarrassed by the theft of the Comtesse de Vendome necklace from a store in the Ginza by the Panthers two years earlier. Hadziahmetovic was arrested on March 14, 2009, at Larnaca airport, in Cyprus, while trying to enter that country on a forged Bulgarian passport. He was charged with being involved in a robbery on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, which are part of Spain. A recording made of Hadziahmetovic’s phone calls by Japanese investigators is said to capture the Panther talking about growing up in Montenegro, where he often went barefoot because his parents couldn’t afford to buy him shoes.

According to an article in the Kyodo News service datelined November 6, 2009, Radovan Jelusic was arrested in Montenegro in September of that year on charges of obstructing justice. A Japanese request that Jelusic be extradited to stand trial for the Ginza robbery was rejected by the Montenegrin government. Sources in Montenegro suggest that Jelusic was released from custody and asked to leave the country.

Jelusic’s arrest in that Rome coffee bar, Samuels also noted, shouldn’t be thought of as unusual, as Panthers keep apartments in Rome and Milan, and are thought to be under the protective umbrella of Italian organized crime.

Some senior European detectives credit Jelusic with being among the “brains” of the Panthers’ global crime spree, and believe that his arrest may signal an end to Italy’s role as a safe haven for Balkan jewel thieves. If so, it seems likely that the Italian police will be making more arrests of Pink Panthers—and of the Italian citizens who facilitate and profit from their crimes.

In news from the region’s other big, sexy case – the Serbian-Montenegrin cocaine ring busted last year for trying to bring tons of the stuff to Europe from South America – Serbia announced last week that it has confiscated three family homes and three apartments from six gang members. No word yet on the value of the properties, which will be auctioned off by the middle of June.

Serbia’s organized crime prosecution has indicted 20 people for connections to the drugs gang.

Unfortunately, Darko Saric, the alleged leader of the gang, is still at large. Saric is a Montenegrin by birth but has held a Serbian passport for the past several years. The two countries have been arguing over his whereabouts for the better part of six months. Last week, police chiefs from both countries finally met to discuss the fugitive, but it doesn’t look like their talking points have shifted:

(Serbian police director Milorad) Veljović said that he told his Montenegrin counterpart that the Serbian media has speculated that Šarić was hiding in his hometown of Pljevlja, in northern Montenegro.

“I openly told him that the public in Serbia is, for the most part, convinced that some people who have international warrants out for their arrests are currently located on the territory of Montenegro. He told me openly that he does not have such information, but that he would take measures to find out and to make good on his decisions as the police director and as a professional police officer,” Veljović said.

Also last week, political parties were warned yet again that they are going to have to start accounting for their funding. And soon. Officials will be drafting a new law next month, and it will mean that parties will have to report their revenues to the Anti-Corruption Agency, which will then check them, along with the State Auditing Agency. Penalties for not complying include criminal prosecution for those responsible, as well as possibly banning the political party.

Kosovo: PM’s cousin involved in shady electricity dealings?

The prime minister’s cousin may have cost the Kosovo electricity utility, KEK, €8 million by inflating the price of electricity the company buys, a prominent Kosovo newspaper reported last week, citing a report sent to American aid agency USAID. Nijazi Thaci is KEK’s public purchases director, and he also happens to be the cousin of Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci. Serbian radio-television B92 reported:

According to a report from an American USAID advisors, quoted in the article, (Nijazi) Thaci approved the purchase of electricity from November 2008 to May 2009 for a price that was 20 percent higher than usual.

The newspaper writes that the report of the PA Consulting company was sent to USAID which states that KEK spend EUR 8mn more than necessary for the electricity.

“Despite all warnings to KEK that it should not buy electricity at a higher price in order for B and C category consumers to have electricity 24 hours a day, based on the instructions of the Kosovo government, KEK signed a contract in the amount of EUR 41mn for the period in question,” the report states.

As though KEK needs any more allegations of corruption. The utility has long been a symbol of everything that’s wrong with Kosovo – many people I know there often mentioned that around €1 billion in international money had been thrown at KEK, while generators droned on the streets of Pristina, Peja or Prizren during yet another power blackout. Even without black eyes like the German UN senior staff member who embezzled millions of euros from KEK, the company has one of the worst reputations in the Balkans. One would think that the prime minister would have thought twice before appointing a relative to run KEK’s public purchases in the first place, but then again, this is a region where leaders give not a fig for silly Western notions about appearances of impropriety.

At any rate, and perhaps not unsurprisingly, B92 reported that KEK officials denied receiving the report from US advisors. It’ll be interesting to see how the Thaci government and KEK do their damage control on this one.

Greece: Crisis abetted by illicit financial flows?

The news here in the US has been pretty consistent about covering Greece’s debt crisis, particularly last week when it was linked to a weird plunge in stock prices. Most coverage explains the crisis by saying that Greece borrowed a ton of money during the boom years to cover its increased public spending and public sector wages, at the same time that widespread tax evasion kept the government’s coffers emptier than they should have been.

But a new report posits that Greece’s money troubles would be largely over, if only the country could curb what anti-corruption watchdogs call “illicit financial flows.” Dev Kar, who’s the lead economist with US-based watchdog Global Financial Integrity, wrote that such flows cost Greece US$160 billion in the 2000s.

So what financial flows is he talking about? He’s talking about unrecorded money from the underground economy, or black markets, gray markets and everything else that’s not above-board, legit, and involves paying taxes to the government. GFI summed it up nicely in its press release:

Mr. Kar goes on to note that, paradoxically enough, Greek traders manipulated customs invoices to sneak illicit capital into the country. These inflows, due to their illicit nature, did not contribute to the solvency or growth of the Greek economy.  Mr. Kar writes:

Interestingly, according to the study conducted at GFI, there were illicit inflows into Greece which totaled about US$96 billion through the misinvoicing of trade transactions, probably as a result of import duty evasion and smuggling…As illicit inflows are unrecorded, they escape the government's tax net and cannot be used to sustain high-quality economic growth…Even as Greece "enjoyed" illicit inflows every single year from 2000-2009 through trade misinvoicing, the country was being pushed to the verge of bankruptcy!