Terrorist Finance (merged thread)

[Bill Moore]

Some updates that are relevant to old and emergent security challenges, and the nexus between irregular adversaries and organized crime.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100952225

Organized crime: World’s most lucrative criminal activities

Cross-border organized crime is big business, worth about $2.1 trillion per year, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC), equivalent to 3.5 percent of world GDP in 2009. That's more than six times the world's development aid budget for that year, and equivalent to about 7 percent of global exports of merchandise.


Perhaps unsurprisingly, trafficking illegal drugs is the most lucrative form of illicit business, constituting about half of all proceeds from transnational organized crime. However, plenty of money is also being made from less high-profile enterprises, such as smuggling natural resources such as timber, oil, and gold and other precious metals.

To learn more about this, and other highly profitable criminal activities, read on.

Crime gangs cash in on Europe's budget flights

This type of organized crime group flies gang members to a country in the morning to carry out a succession of quick-fire robberies, before flying out in the evening. They hand over their ill-gotten gains to criminal partners in the local area, and regularly take a different flight to a different country the following day. Private homes, businesses, high-value cars, machine parts and increasingly commodities like metal are all targets

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We need to make sure there is a swift exchange of intelligence - so we can get ahead of the game and identify these gangs before they strike, or at least get on the back of them as soon as they have done," he said. And make sure we have the means possible by which we can coordinate multinational arrest operations in the end... not working at a national level, but as a connected community.

http://www.stripes.com/news/middle-e...ships-1.245154

Terrorism newest worry for cargo ships

“A rocket fired by suspected al-Qaida terrorists at a COSCO container ship as it transited the Suez Canal in August apparently hit a container crammed full of smuggled cigarettes,” the JOC article said, citing a report by the Irish Independent.

The illicit cargo, with an estimated street value of nearly $6 million, was headed to a phony furniture company in Dundalk, Ireland, part of a smuggling operation supposedly run by businessmen with links to the former members of the Irish Republican Army.

According to Irish press reports, the cigarettes were believed to have been acquired in Vietnam and were heading for Rotterdam, the Netherlands, when the ship was attacked. A tracking device was placed on the container at the Port of Rotterdam and tracked by satellite through Dublin Port and on to a village near Dundalk in County Louth, where four men were arrested.

This is serious, but on the lighter side it appears AQ exposed an international cigarette smuggling operation. Do they get reward money for this?