Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Colombian gangs stealing from EU hospitals

A new twist on the drug trade’s criminality:
Greek police say a Colombian criminal gang has stolen expensive medical equipment from four Athens hospitals, with similar thefts seen across Europe. Three men and a woman, who apparently returned to Bogota,

Three suspects, still at large, have been identified. Bogota police have recovered four endoscopes, which tend to be used for internal examinations.

The Athens thefts happened last month. The Colombians had entered as tourists.

Police said a drug gang probably wanted endoscopes to check that drug-smuggling mules had really swallowed the drugs.

If you think the drug gangs would be able to afford buying their own, it’s a matter of scale:

Attica security chief Christos Papazafiris, quoted by Greek media, said:

  • Medical equipment worth more than €500,000 (£434,000; $563,000) was stolen from St Savvas Hospital on 15 May
  • Equipment worth €115,000 was stolen from the Lamia and Larissa hospitals between 19-22 May
  • Two gastroscopes (used to inspect the interior of the stomach) were stolen from the gastroenterological department of Volos hospital on 21 May

The losses are hitting a Greek health service struggling because of austerity cuts in recent years, imposed under the EU bailout deal.

Mr Papazafiris said similar thefts had taken place in the past four years in Lithuania, Luxembourg, Spain, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy, France and Croatia.

Multiply the amounts stolen from Greece times ten countries, and now you’re talking.

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Brazil: The Greek ambassador murder mystery UPDATE Moreira confessed?

The Greek ambassador to Brazil, Kyriakos Amiridis, age 59, had been missing since Monday night.
Police investigate disappearance of Greek ambassador in Rio. Authorities analyzing corpse found inside what is believed to be missing diplomat’s rental car

Brazilian police investigating the disappearance of the Greek ambassador to Brazil, Kyriakos Amiridis, suspect a charred body found inside a rental car could be that of the ambassador. Amiridis, 59, was spending his Christmas holidays in Rio de Janeiro but has not been seen since Monday night, when he was last spotted driving his rented Ford Ka in the suburb of Nova Iguaçu. His Brazilian wife informed the police of his disappearance two days later.
. . .
Nova Iguaçu, a city connected to Rio, where Amiridis’s wife has a family home and where the car was found, is not a traditional destination for tourists. It has a population of around 800,000 and is one of the 13 cities that make up the Baixada Fluminens, a violent territory where paramilitary groups and drug dealers operate with certain impunity.

O Globo (link in Portuguese) reports that the police have identified the body as that of Ambassador Amiridis. Investigators have requested the arrest of Mrs. Amiridis, Françoise de Souza Oliveira, her alleged lover, military police officer Sergio Gomes Moreira, Jr., and two unnamed accomplices.

According to the police, Ambassador Amiridis was murdered at his home, his body was removed from the house at 3AM Wednesday morning and placed in the car he rented on December 21, where it was found burned yesterday below an underpass.

Amiridis was Greek consul-general in Rio from 2001 to 2004 and became Greek ambassador to Brazil in January of this year.

UPDATE:
Globo TV reported on Friday afternoon that officer Sergio Moreira, 29, confessed to killing the ambassador on Monday night. Police have not yet confirmed this new information.

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Puerto Rico: Countdown to the Greecespot

If you didn’t see this coming, you haven’t been paying attention.

From Drudge:

NEXT GREECE MAY BE IN USA…

Lurking debt threatens cities, states…

Reality hits San Juan streets amid Puerto Rico debt woes…

Businesses shuttered…

Residents living day to day…

Fallout Will Hit Florida…

Investors scramble to avoid losses…

Can’t say we didn’t see it coming: From the October 26, 2013 Economist, Puerto Rico
Greece in the Caribbean
Stuck with a real debt crisis in its back yard, America can learn from Europe’s Aegean follies

Like Greece, Puerto Rico is a chronically uncompetitive place locked in a currency union with a richer, more productive neighbour. The island’s economy is also dominated by a vast, inefficient near-Athenian public sector. And, as with Greece, there are fears that a chaotic default could precipitate a far bigger crisis by driving away investors, and pushing up borrowing costs in America’s near-$4-trillion market for state and local bonds.

I have yet to find any moves by the Puerto Rican government towards structural reforms that would stimulate economic growth, reduce bureaucracy (and the accompanying red tape), and foster a business-friendly environment. Instead, the governor tells bondholders to “share the sacrifices.”

Welcome to the Greecespot.

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Nigel Farage goes to it

While the Crisis Ensnares [the European] Central Bank in Desperate Bid to Save Euro, the man who said, “If the EU ever had any intention to democratize itself it would have done so in the Constitutional Treaty,” has his say in the European Parliament:

Arrivederci, democrazia.

Countdown to failure.

UPDATE
Daniel Hannan; You can have the euro or you can have democracy – you can’t have both

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Venezuela to withdraw from the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes

Chávez is intent on turning Venezuela into Zimbabwe: As $3.5 billion in direct foreign investment has left the country in 2009-2010,
Chávez Takes Steps to Exit Global Forum
Pullout From World Bank Unit Would Fit a Nationalistic Bent

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela has taken steps to pull out of the global forum most used to settle investor disputes, where Caracas faces more than $40 billion in claims for nationalized properties.

Documents show that Mr. Chávez, shown in August, is moving to avoid financial sanctions from abroad.

Venezuelan officials have drawn up plans, at Mr. Chávez’s order, to withdraw from the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID, a unit of the World Bank in Washington, according to recent documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
…
Venezuela’s withdrawal from the ICSID also would fit well the nationalistic bent that has led Mr. Chávez to expropriate 988 companies, 401 so far this year, according to Conindustria, a Venezuela industry chamber.

Here are the claims they’re talking about,

VENEZUELA

The WSJ quotes Dietmar W. Prager, a lawyer with the New York firm of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP who has represented investors with ICSID disputes with Venezuela, in what may be the understatement of the week,

A withdrawal would send an unfriendly signal about Venezuela’s policy towards foreign investment

You can say that again.

————————–

In other Latin American news, Mario Blejer, a former Bank of England adviser who took the reins of Argentina’s central bank after its 2001 default on $95 billion, is telling Greece to ‘Default Big’ to Address its Debt Crisis.

Well, at least he didn’t advise them to plunder private pensions.

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Bomb explodes at Greek Embassy in Argentina

As a larger bomb exploded in Athens, Greece,

Separately, a small bomb that exploded outside the Greek embassy in Buenos Aires caused minimal damage overnight and no one was at the embassy, Foreign Ministry spokesman Grigoris Delavekouras told the AP.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for either bombing, but suspicion fell on militant anarchist groups, which have stepped up attacks in the past two years. A group of suspects is facing trial in Athens next month.

Authorities in Europe and elsewhere say violent anarchist groups are showing greater international coordination. A violent Italian anarchist group carried out a string of embassy bombings in the past week in solidarity with jailed Greek militants.

There were no injuries in the Argentinian explosion, which happened at 2AM local time today.

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A Greek tragedy of Dickensian proportions

Roger Kimball writes on the Greek bailout:
Mr. Micawber travels to Greece

So now the Europeans are taking a page from the Obama playbook. Greece teeters on the abyss, the bond markets swoon, and it’s panic time all around.

Who are these people we’ve elected to “lead” us?

Keep that question in the back of your mind as you accompany Mr. Micawber on his trip to Greece. Like Mr. Micawber, Angela Merkel and Prime Minister George Papandreou are hoping that “something will turn up.”  Like him, they expect it hourly. But, unlike Mr. Micawber, they have thus far failed to take on board that central bit of economic wisdom he imparted to young David Copperfield:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the God of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and—and in short you are for ever floored.

“For ever floored” — not a good thing. The Europeans scramble and put together $1 trillion dollars in loan guarantees (including $50 billion or so from Uncle Sam, i.e., from you, Dear Reader) and the markets gyrated wildly upward. For a day. Monday, Monday: can’t trust that day, as the Mamas and Papas observed. For Tuesday came and, guess what, $1 trillion wasn’t enough!

What would be enough?  As my friend Bill Voegeli puts it in his new book about America’s welfare state, the answer is nothing. The maw is always open. The appetite limitless. When it comes to government subsidy, the answer is Never Enough.

Go read the rest. Stranger than fiction and much more tragic than David Copperfield.

Speaking of which, irony not included in either one of these reports:
Argentina warns Greek bail-out will fail

The Greek rescue package will fail, according to Cristina Fernández, Argentina’s president, whose country suffered the world’s biggest debt default in 2001.

Here in the US, the unsustainable debt is absolutely no problem to Obama, who’s urging Spain to take “resolute action” to confront Europe’s debt crisis.

Related:
Beware of Greeks selling bonds.

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