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NOTE : Philippines Urges Regional
- Subject: NOTE : Philippines Urges Regional
- From: Rangoonp@xxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 19:43:00
Subject: NOTE : Philippines Urges Regional Crackdown on Mafias
NOTE : Many of these groups wound't exist for a few main reasons:
1) The ruling /controlling groups wouldn't invade other groups regions
or try to kill off some groups ( as the Chinese government tried to do
to the Shoalin people and temples. This led to creation of the Triads
(which was a good thing originally) and later became corrupt.)
2) The people were not economically and noutrishinally impoverished.
Philippines Urges Regional Crackdown on Mafias
Reuters
26-NOV-98
MANILA, Nov 26 (Reuters) - The Philippines on Thursday
urged its Asian neighbours to clamp down on mafia gangs
which are reaping as much as $1 trillion a year in global
profits.
Southeast Asian nations should "establish a culture of
vigilance" as organised crime develops in the region,
Interior
Secretary Ronaldo Puno told a meeting of the Association of
South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
He recommended the region intensify legal cooperation and
exchanges of intelligence to fight the gangs whose global
earnings exceed the gross domestic product of many
countries in the world aside from a handful of the most
industrialised.
Drug traffickers alone account for $400 billion of the
profits,
he said, adding that technology was making criminals more
sophisticated.
"Electronic commerce-- particularly the growing use of smart
cards and cybercash-- has the potential to usher in a new
era of untraceable criminal transactions: new money
laundering techniques and faceless perpetrators," he added.
In a speech read for him by an aide, he said the
phenomenon of organised crime, once thought to be the
preserve of Italian and U.S. mafias, had spawned gangs in
Central and South America, Russia, China, the Middle East
and Southeast Asia.
"They are engaged in such felonious activities as illicit
drug
trafficking, money laundering, terrorism, arms smuggling,
trafficking in persons and piracy," he said.
"According to recent international estimates, those
organisations amass profits of approximately a trillion
dollars
annually."
The two-day ASEAN meeting on trans-national crime, which
ended on Thursday, was attended by police officials and
experts from the ASEAN states of Malaysia, the Philippines,
Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos and
Myanmar.