Categories
· Cross-Border/Crime
non-USA, by Country
· UK
· Balkans
Organizations
· BAT
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BAT partner financed Serb war criminals says Croat magazine
Jump to full article: The Observer (uk), 2001-07-15
Author: Antony Barnett and Pazit Ravina
Intro: Clarke's office last night refused to comment on the disclosures but revealed that he intends to sever all links with BAT if he wins the Tory leadership.
It has emerged that BAT cut a deal to build a £50 million cigarette factory in former Yugoslavia with multi-millionaire Serbian businessman Stanko Subotic.
An investigation by the Croatian magazine Nacional into the alleged criminal activities of Subotic detailed his cigarette-smuggling operations. It also claimed his money helped to hide former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the commander in charge at the time of the Srebrenica massacre which killed up to 8,000 people. Both men are wanted in The Hague for crimes against humanity. . .
Balkan experts believe that throughout the last decade cigarette-smuggling was a key instrument of the Yugoslav secret service, which used it to help finance the Balkan wars.
The revelation of links between BAT and Kestner has already forced one senior European politician to resign from the company's board. In May Peter Hess, the speaker of the Swiss parliament, quit his job with BAT.
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Categories
· Cross-Border/Crime
non-USA, by Country
· Balkans
|
Jump to full article: BBC Online, 2001-04-28
Author: Balkans analyst Misha Glenny
Intro: For under the pressures of war, sanctions and economic collapse, south-eastern Europe has become one vast factory of criminality, turning over vast quantities of migrants, prostitutes, tobacco, guns and drugs, most of which are destined for the world's largest market - the European Union.
The Balkan mafias have sunk their claws into every limb of the former Yugoslavia. Cigarettes produced in Macedonia's three tobacco enterprises are packaged illegally as perfect Marlboro replicas and distributed via Serbia to central Europe and, above all, via Kosovo and Montenegro into Italy.
Behind every apparent nationalist crisis in the region lies a much seedier squabble between mafia bosses . .
The Macedonian crisis, when Albanians and Macedonians almost went to war in late March and early April, was sparked in part by a dispute over the control of the lucrative illegal tobacco smuggling operation into Kosovo.
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Categories
· Cross-Border/Crime
non-USA, by Country
· Italy
· Greece
· Balkans
|
Jump to full article: AP, 2001-01-10
Intro: An alleged Mafia kingpin suspected of running a vast cigarette smuggling network in the Balkans was arrested Wednesday.
Albino Prudentino, 50, was taken into custody after a police raid on a house in the seaside resort of Aghios Vasilios, near the southern port city of Patra.
Police said Prudentino was the head of the " Sacra Corona Unita" organization, which had an annual turnover of $818 million from cigarette smuggling.
" He is considered one of the largest cigarette smugglers in Greece and Italy, " Athens Security Police Chief Giorgos Aggelakos said.
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Categories
· Cross-Border/Crime
non-USA, by Country
· Balkans
|
Collaborators in crime
Jump to full article: Serbia Ministry of Information (rs), 1999-12-26
Intro: In a text titled "Macedonia in the claws of Albanian Mafia", Start weekly from Skopje reveals the oil, drug and cigarettes smuggling on the territory of the "western Balkans" supported by KFOR officers and UNMIK's head Bernard Kouchner.
The weekly remarks that this time it will not mention the white slavery, although it is also under the control of the Albanian Mafia. [This graph only]
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