GlobalPost Roundup: Major money laundering case discovered in Macedonia

Latest: Corruption and Money Laundering

 

GlobalPost

Roundup: Major money laundering case discovered in Macedonia.

 

SKOPJE, Oct. 21 (Xinhua) -- Businessmen and former Defense Ministry officials were arrested in Macedonia on Tuesday under the suspicions of corruption and money laundering.

The Macedonian Organized Crime Unit filed charges against nine people involved in the contract to service six military helicopters. One of them was a former head of the Logistics Department of the Ministry of Defense.

"The service of the Army helicopters was performed by the Ukrainian company Ukrainmash in the period between 2005 and 2007. But on top of the three contracts with this company, worth around 2 million U.S. dollars, the official in the Ministry of Defense ordered payment to additional companies," Ivo Kotevski, the spokesperson for the Macedonian Ministry of Interior explained on Tuesday.

According to the investigation, a network of companies based in Macedonia, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Britain were used to launder the money illegally drawn out of the Ministry of Defense. The total amount of money the investigators believe were misused amounts to 2.76 million dollars.

The Macedonian Ministry of Defense issued a statement on Tuesday explaining that it fully supports the investigation of the police for discovering the criminal activities.

"The Ministry of Defense highly evaluates the integrity of our employees, the military personnel and the companies that we work with," stated the Ministry.

This is one of the biggest case of money laundering discovered by Macedonian institutions.

Money laundering is actually a criminal act of legalizing the illegally acquired capital, Criminal Law expert Vladimir Pivovarov, professor at FON University in Skopje, explained to Xinhua on Tuesday.

"The fight against this type of criminal acts is hard and the usual reason for this is politics," said the expert.

"If we take a look at this case, it took the authorities almost 10 years to discover it and money laundering is a type of criminal act that can be discovered immediately after it is committed. Why did they wait so long? This creates an impression of selectively timed fight against organized crime," Pivovarov added.

He pointed out that this is a problem not only in Macedonia, but also in the whole Balkan region. The fight against money laundering is slow and often ineffective.

"It is a weakness of the entire region. There are mechanisms to prevent this, but they need to be implemented," said Pivovarov.

"We have to introduce stricter methodology for public procurement that will prevent the suspicion that is usually created in the public concerning the fairness of this process," Pivovarov said to Xinhua.

Macedonian institutions are struggling to improve its capacity to fight money laundering. Aside from the Ministry of Interior, the Public Prosecutor and the Bureau of Financial Intelligence are in charge of the investigations for this type of criminal acts and the statistics shows a slight increase in the number of discovered cases every year.

According to the statistics of the Ministry of Interior, seven cases of money laundering were discovered and processed in Macedonia in 2011, 10 in 2012, and 12 cases in 2013. But at the same time, there are over 15,000 institutions in the country that are monitored for potential suspicious financial transactions.

All countries in the Balkan region are working to improve their efficiency in the fight against money laundering. They have signed bilateral agreements to help them exchange information and ease the operations against money laundering.