The top official responsible for investigating corruption issues in Nigeria has been sent away for one year to undergo “training”.

From the International Herald Tribune:

Nigeria’s anti-corruption chief, whose investigations have ensnared some of the country’s wealthiest politicians and officials, will be sent to a year-long training course in a remote police academy, according to senior law enforcement officials in Nigeria, in what many analysts and anti-corruption activists say is an attempt to sideline him.

Havocscope is currently listing Nigeria’s Illicit Markets at $160 Million.

The BBC is reporting that the entire police force in the town of Rosarito has been stripped of its weapons due to concerns that the police force has been working with drug trafficking organizations.

The Mexican army has confiscated guns from the entire police force of the town of Rosarito, near the Mexican border with the US.
Mexican authorities suspect that the town’s police have been colluding with drug trafficking gangs.

Police will examine over 200 weapons to see if any were used in the killing of the town’s police chief earlier in the month.

From Threat Level:

According to the study by Digital Music News and BigChampagne, about 36 percent of the world’s personal computers are equipped with LimeWire, the peer-to-peer program at the center of a bitter copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the Recording Industry Association of America. That’s up from 34 percent the year before.

Over 1 billion songs are downloaded from peer-to-peer programs each month.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced yesterday that they had dismantled a group in Montreal that illegally distributed copies of television shows.

From the AFP:

n a statement, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said the Montreal group reproduced popular television shows such as “The Six Million-Dollar Man” and “Ally McBeal” using 200 DVD burners capable of making 14,000 copies a day.

The DVDs were then sold as originals at a discounted price and distributed through several websites to US and Canadian customers.

Movie Piracy is an estimated $18.2 Billion market.

Could this be a sign of the levels of corruption in China?

From the New York Times:

A Web site created by China’s anti-corruption bureau crashed after it began operating on Tuesday, overwhelmed by traffic from people wishing to file complaints, according to the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has released their annual Drug Situation in Canada 2006 report.

Among the main highlights from CTV.ca:

In a two-year period, Canada has become a net exporter of ecstasy, once known as the “rave” drug but now available at a wide range of youth-oriented venues.

“Between late 2005 and 2006, Canada replaced the Netherlands and, to a lesser extent, Belgium as the primary supply source of ecstasy for its domestic trade and for the U.S. illicit market,” the report said.

In 2004, authorities in the United States seized 1.1 million ecstasy pills originating from Canada.  In 2006, 5.2 million pills were seized.

About $2.3 billion worth of drugs, based on their estimated street value, were seized in 2006, the RCMP said.

All forms of cannabis — marijuana, hashish, hash oil — accounted for about 93 per cent of this total.

Read the entire report: The Drug Situation Report – 2006.

See prices on Canada’s Illicit Drug Trade.

Two men in Israel were sentenced yesterday for trafficking humans for the sole purpose of harvesting their organs. In the indictment, kidneys were harvested at prices between $125,000 to $135,000. Like other activities of the black market, service providers are able to manipulate and control the consumers because of the lack of government oversight and legal enforcement.

One of the victims was an illiterate 32-year-old single mother from an Arab village in central Israel. The pair told her she would undergo a simple operation, and she would be back on her feet in two days. At one point, the woman changed her mind, and in response Allan and Zakhalka threatened to report her to the police, telling her it was a crime to agree to donate a kidney. Like the other victims, the woman was flown to Ukraine where she underwent the surgery. When she returned home, the victims refused to pay her the $7,000 they had promised her.

The International Herald Tribune reports on the shipping route that counterfeit drugs pass through before ending up in consumers hands.

Three months ago, when the authorities announced that they had seized a large cache of counterfeit drugs from Euro Gulf’s warehouse deep inside a sprawling free trade zone here, they gave no hint of the raid’s global significance.

But an examination of the case reveals its link to a complex supply chain of fake drugs that ran from China through Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, Britain and the Bahamas, ultimately leading to an Internet pharmacy whose American customers believed they were buying medicine from Canada, according to interviews with regulators and drug company investigators in six countries.

The seizure highlights how counterfeit drugs move in a global economy, and why they are so difficult to trace. And it underscores the role played by free trade zones — areas specially designated by a growing number of countries to encourage trade, where tariffs are waived and there is minimal regulatory oversight.

The problem is that counterfeiters use free trade zones to hide — or sanitize — a drug’s provenance, or to make, market or relabel adulterated products, according to anticounterfeiting experts.

Counterfeit Drugs is a $40 Billion market.

A new report published by the United Nations claims that the counterfeit goods trade is being controlled by organized crime syndicates.

From the AP:

Counterfeiting is a dangerous and growing enterprise controlled by organized criminals who are exploiting the same trade routes used for trafficking drugs, arms and human beings, the United Nations said in a report released Friday.

The articles mentions that Chinese traids, Japanese Yakuza, the Neopolitan Camorra, and Russian Mafia are involved in the counterfeit goods trade.

Read the report, Counterfeiting: A global spread, a global threat.

The Counterfeit Goods and Piracy market is listed at $527 Billion.

China is currently preventing US films from being shown in its country in retaliation to a intellectual property case filed at the WTO.

From the New York Times:

The Chinese government has not announced any ban, but American movies are no longer being approved for release early next year, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Chinese action, these officials said, might be in retaliation for the decision by the United States last April to file an intellectual property rights case with the World Trade Organization. The filing was meant to pressure China to enforce more strictly its intellectual property rights laws against the pirating of American movies and to give American companies greater access to the Chinese market.

In a normal year, China only allows about 20 foreign films to be shown in its theaters.  According to The Times (UK), movies that have not been granted permission recently are films such as Beowulf and Disney’s Enchanted.  By preventing foreign films from being shown, consumers are forced to purchase pirated DVDs on street corners in order to see hit movies.

 Although these blockbusters may not be seen on the big screen, they are widely available on every street corner on pirated DVDs. It is this theft of intellectual property rights that is angering US officials and the big Hollywood studios.

Pirated movies is a $18.2 Billion market.