Prague, April 23 (CTK) – Criminal groups from the Balkans largely contributed to the foreigner crime rate in the Czech Republic in 2015, while Russian-speaking and Asian groups played the major role, says a report on migration and foreigners’ integration for the cabinet and MPs which was just released.
The document says major criminal organisations were trying more and more to influence the legislative process also on the government and parliamentary levels last year.
They also attempted to have a say with a significant national police corps based on corruption.
The report says the monitored criminal organisations continued to participate in economic crime (manipulated procurement and sales of public property, VAT evasion, leasing and credit frauds).
It says Asian and Balkans criminal structures participate in drug crime.
The document also says “continued effort to penetrate the state administration and public self-rule bodies as well as the judiciary system based on corruption continued among all monitored ethnically orientated criminal structures.
The report says the Balkans groups often have their centres in Germany. They use the Czech Republic as a place where to launder money coming from criminal activities, mainly by the production and sales of drugs outside the country.
The crime committed by the Russian-language mafia was affected by the Ukrainian-Russian crisis. That is why the police registered a massive rise in the demand for forged residence permits in the EU countries.
“Organised groups actively transferred their activities to this area in the course of 2015 since it proved to be most profitable,” the report writes and adds that a similar trend can be expected in the future, too.
The Vietnamese criminal community is led by known criminal authorities that are linked to major Vietnamese marketplaces and the Vietnamese embassy, the report says.
They mainly commit tax crime. According to “moderate estimates,” they cause tax evasion worth dozens of billions of crowns annually, the report says.
Vietnamese criminals also focus on drug production, mainly pervitin and marijuana. The report admits that it is possible without any limitation to buy drugs in border market places.
“The sole problem the drug customers face are checks by German bodies close to the border,” the report says.
“Neither the sellers nor the buyers face almost any risk by Czech repressive bodies,” the report writes.
Monitoring by plainclothes men is practically ruled out because the Vietnamese vendors have developed a sense of identifying “customers,” the report says.
It also speaks about feigned marriages. Mainly Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in EU countries are interested in Czech women with a low social and education status.
In a passage on prostitution, the report says in the vicinity of Znojmo, south Moravia, it also attracts clients from Austria, including migrants from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
A total of 101,883 people, including 7264 foreigners, were criminally prosecuted in the Czech Republic with a population of 10.5 million last year. The number of foreigners was 1.7 percent lower than in 2014.
ms/dr
