Eideard

Preparing for elections,eh?

An Ivory Coast man arrested while allegedly trying to buy weapons in New York last week was on official business, a spokesman for his government says.

Former Ivory Coast Defense Minister Bertin Kadet told Radio France Internationale that the man arrested by the FBI was an army colonel named Yao N’Guessan.

Kadet said N’Guessan was sent to New York to purchase crowd control armaments in advance of the Ivory Coast’s October elections.

The FBI said N’Guessan allegedly was engaged in a deal worth more than $3.8 million for 4,000 handguns, 200,000 rounds of ammunition and 50,000 tear gas grenades when he was apprehended.

The funds to purchase the armaments had already been transferred to the United States.

Opponents of Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbago say the arms purchase was intended to keep his party in power.

The United Nations imposed an embargo on arms to the Ivory Coast in 2004.

That’s what happens when you send an amateur out on a shopping trip like this one.

He should have worked through traditional channels, discovered which members of Congress would grease the wheels of international arms sales for him, which lobbyists needed to be engaged to avoid anything like law or principle getting in the way.

US authorities have indicted 11 German and Chinese executives for conspiring to illegally import $40 million worth of honey from China. The executives were accused of being part of an operation which mislabelled honey and tainted it with antibiotics in an attempt to avoid import duties.

The case is part of a crackdown on illegal imports of substandard and counterfeit products.

Officials say it is the biggest food smuggling case in US history.

Ten of the suspects were senior executives at Alfred L Wolff, a German company, which allegedly bought cheap Chinese honey and, en route to the US, filtered out “pollen and other trace elements that could indicate that the honey originated from China”, according to the charge sheet.

A sales manager from the Chinese-based QHD Sanghai Honey was also indicted…

Those involved are alleged to have made 606 illegal shipments over six years, beginning in March 2002.

Senator Charles Schumer said he welcomed the fact that law enforcement agencies were taking “honey laundering” seriously.

Har!

Nordic customs officials have arrested a truck driver after he tried to illegally import 28 tons of Chinese garlic into the European Union.

The driver was intercepted last month as he drove the pungent truckload from Norway, which is outside the EU and where garlic is exempt from customs’ duties, into Sweden, where garlic is subject to a 9.6 percent EU-wide duty.

Smuggling of cheaply produced Chinese garlic into the EU is on the rise, with around 1,200 tons brought into the 27-nation bloc via Norway since 2009, according to the European Anti-Fraud Office, known as OLAF.

“The interception of the lorry was the result of a carefully prepared initiative coordinated by OLAF,” the EU said in a statement. “This action came about due to the excellent cooperation provided by Norwegian and Swedish customs.”

Whoop-de-fracking-doo.

Imposing a duty of almost 10% is just crap protectionism. Not that that is outside the framework of most EU political decisions, anyway.