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BALKANS: Seized Cars, Property Say Crime Does Not Pay

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jan 19 2010 (IPS) - A rare fleet of 20 luxury cars and snazzy jeeps has remained parked in front of the heavily guarded special court in the capital for days now.

The vehicles do not belong to judges or prosecutors working in the building, but represent the first tangible evidence that a one-year-old ‘Law on Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds from Crime’ is being implemented.

All the vehicles were once the property of individuals convicted for organised crime activities, seized under a law that came into force in March 2008. It was created in close cooperation with Italy, where laws against the mafia saw confiscation of property worth millions of dollars in recent years.

“It’s not our aim to score cheap political points,” justice minister Snezana Malovic told reporters before the special court on Sunday. “We want security and safety for our citizens, particularly children, by sweeping the drug lords from the streets,” she added.

Most of the cars belonged to prominent narcotic dealers in Serbia, sentenced to long jail terms.

“Narcotic dealers earn the life-long earnings of a Serbian miner in one night only and the time has come to say it’s enough,” she added.

Presentation of seized property included a police provided video on confiscation of a safe content in the premises of one of the organised crime groups. There were more than 550,000 euros (786,500 dollars) in small bills in the safe, apparently coming from street sale of narcotics.

“This is money that can keep a home for abandoned children in Zvecanska Street or homes for autistic and handicapped children in and around our capital going for years,’’ Malovic said.

“At the moment, it is enough for 5,000 monthly child support payments or 4,000 small pensions,” she told IPS. “Under the law, the confiscated money should be used for such purposes…and this is just the beginning,” Malovic added.

According to the organised crime chief prosecutor, Miljko Radisavljevic, also present at the venue, “property worth dozens of millions of euros has been confiscated so far from 208 individuals involved in organised crime.”

“The cars are just a fraction, but important for the broader public to see,” he said. Apart from that, dozens of houses, apartments and business premises were confiscated by the state.

“They can be and will be certainly turned into the premises to the benefit of all, like crèches, nursery schools or safe homes,” Radisavljevic said. “This is our start,” he added.

So far, the public had heard only of the confiscation of the luxury villa of Milorad Ulemek Legija last year. He masterminded the assassination of the reform oriented prime minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003 and is serving a 40-year sentence for the crime.

However, he was also one of the heads of the organised crime ring known as “Zemun Klan”. Families of two of its members saw confiscation of a huge construction site in the Belgrade suburb of Zemun, worth 8.5 million US dollars, last year.

“All the people whose property was seized under the new law officially did not have a single day of work in any records,” Malovic said.

That does not include Ulemek, a member of the secret police who could not prove before the court how he obtained a villa worth more than 300,000 dollars on a modest police salary in the 1990s.

As there was public outcry about Ulemek’s villa being turned into a nursery, it will go to the police unit that deals with e-crime.

The Zemun Klan premises would mostly be put to similar uses, also due to the public protests, as the clan was one of major drug dealing rings in the region.

Organised crime that knows no boundaries between Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro or Serbia represents one of the major obstacles for these nations’ bid to join the European Union (EU). Organised crime groups have members from all these countries, which have a common language, customs and a large market.

One of the examples of such cooperation, that goes international as well, was the large Argentine and Uruguay police action, dubbed “Balkans Warrior,” which led to the seizure of about two tons of cocaine last year.

Seventeen Balkan members of the ring arrested in Latin America and the Balkans came from Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia.

Joint efforts in the region against organised crime will be crowned at the end of January when Bosniak, Croat and Serbian officials will sign an agreement on mutual extradition of wanted criminals, thus correcting a legal obstacle dating back to the civil war.

At the time all the nations introduced laws that prevented extradition of their nationals to foreign countries. This was motivated by the desire to protect potential war criminals, but played successfully into hands of organised crime.

As many of organised crime members held multiple Bosniak, Croat or Serbian citizenships, they could thwart justice by slipping from one country to another.