Spotlight 10: A global overview
Italy, Mexico, Albania, the Balkans, the US. And Covid, again. The new year and an old commitment to better understand crime and corruption.
Hi! Welcome back to the tenth issue of Spotlight, a fortnightly collection of news, articles, and events about organised crime and corruption curated by Firm UK.
Every two weeks a collective of experts, academics, and volunteers will select a few relevant articles and/or events that will help you to understand our society under the hood.
2020 has been all but a boring year. Covid has taken centre-stage but that did not, unfortunately, stop crime and corruption. In this tenth issue, we would like to suggest a global overview of how the weirdest year in modern history has ended and how, instead, the new one has started. So you will read about how Italian mafias are thriving in lockdown, a decrease in convictions in Western Balkans and a newly-approved move by the US Congress to track shell companies. Moreover, the Mexican military is getting more powerful and there’s a role of Albanian cocaine traffickers in Ecuador.
Finally, two events you don’t want to miss.
We hope you enjoy Spotlight. And if you like it, please share it with your network and invite them to subscribe.
Thank you!
Conviction rates for organised crime down in Western Balkans
A report by UNODC on organised crime in the Western Balkans published in December 2020 revealed that - while prosecution rates are on the rise - the number of cases ending in convictions is decreasing.
The findings concern specifically four markets: drug sales, people trafficking, firearms, and the smuggling of migrants — in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, and Kosovo. The authors of the investigation carried out interviews with prisoners, experts, and law enforcement officials; they then found discrepancies between qualitative data and statistics. As the article also notices:
“It’s clear that there is a gap between the convictions and what is happening on the ground. While from the conviction data it seems that most criminal events in the four markets are not linked to organised crime, interviews with victims and prisoners reveal otherwise.”
The Mafia is thriving in lockdown
Organised crime clans have benefited from crisis, whether they have been political crisis, economic crisis, or even health crisis like the one we have been in for the past twelve months.
This UnHerd article by Tobias Jones unpacks the role of mafias during (and after) the Covid-19 crisis. Last year alone, in Italy, loan sharking increased by between 6.5% and 10%, and anti-mafia measures precluding companies from bidding for public contracts raised by up to 150%.
Yet, infiltration in the legal economy is only one of the many consequences of the crisis, explains Firm UK’s associate Federico Varese:
“some criminal groups are looking for a precious and intangible commodity: the legitimacy that is based on social consensus”
and the pandemic has been a rare chance for the mafiosi to hand out favours, which will – with no doubts – be cashed back.
Congress’ Ban on Shell Companies Is a Game-Changer Against Graft
During the last week of December 2020, the US Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual bill generally meant to shore up U.S. defence spending.
The recently-approved Act also includes the Corporate Transparency Act, which targets something even more specific: anonymous shell companies. This requires that the true, human owners of companies formed in the U.S. disclose their identities at the point of formation and upon any change. The rule will effectively ban anonymous shell companies.
The new beneficial ownership registry of U.S. companies will be central to this effort. As the article notices:
"Until now, when criminal investigators have attempted to follow trails of dirty money, they have confronted a wall of anonymous entities, often splayed across multiple, secretive jurisdictions—an obstacle that took tremendous time and resources to overcome, if it could be overcome at all. The new regulations associated with the NDAA will make these investigations much easier to pursue.”
As Mexico's Security deteriorates, the power of the Military grows
While the status of security in Mexico seems to be “in ruin”, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a longtime critic of the U.S.-backed war on drugs, called on the Military as his predecessors did. After two years of this presidency, the military has now a bigger-than-ever role in the country’s affairs.
"The government has deployed record numbers of troops to deal with the deteriorating security situation. They’re patrolling cities, raiding drug labs and protecting strategic installations. But it doesn’t stop there. The military is increasingly the president’s go-to force for tasks previously managed by civilian agencies, from running ports to repairing hospitals to building airports.”
Militarisation calls for much stringent scrutiny to protect democracy, human rights, and the fight against organised crime:
"While leaders are relying on the armed forces, they’re not as focused on developing professional police forces or effective legal systems.”
Albanian Mafia Leaves Trail of Blood in Ecuador
An investigation into the presence and activities of criminal networks of Albanian origins in Ecuador follows recent incidents of violence in the country linked to these groups.
By tracing different individual stories to paint an overall picture of Albanian clans in Ecuador, the article by Insight Crime notices how their presence in Ecuador has been a significant stepping stone for their role in the cocaine scene in the world:
"Almost two decades after the first Albanian traffickers emerged on the scene, Albanian syndicates now control significant portion of Europe’s wholesale and retail cocaine networks, using street-gang affiliates to deal drugs in The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France and Germany among others. Its members have also collaborated as equals with the Italian ‘Ndrangheta”.
Events and webinars
We would also like to suggest the following events for a deeper understanding of the topics covered in the tenth issue of Spotlight:
[26th January 2021 11 AM CET - 5 PM CET] Partnering on anti-trafficking: The key to successful corporate collaboration
This one-hour webinar hosted by Global Initiative will convene businesses, anti-trafficking organisations and experts, and other stakeholders to discuss the foundations of successful partnerships on human trafficking. The webinar will focus on how to identify organisations that can support a business in its anti-trafficking work and explain how successful partnerships between the private sector and other entities can be brokered.[18th January 2021 19 PM CET] [ITALIAN/GERMAN] Antonio Talia: Statale 106. Viaggio sulle strade segrete della ’Ndrangheta
Reading and digital meeting with the author Antonio Talia. The moderation and the German translation will be by the journalist Maike Albath. A journey of 104 kilometers on a two-way road, squeezed between the waters of the Ionian Sea and the slopes of the Aspromonte: the route from Reggio to Siderno takes only an hour and a half by car but from Calabria, it branches out across five continents and over forty years of crime.
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