32 EWN
www.euroweeklynews.com
28 June - 4 July 2018
NEWS EXTRA Price is fright THE average catastral value an estimate of the capital worth of a property in Spain in Malaga Province is at €78,598, the third highest in the country after Madrid (€115,778) and the Balearics (€81,234) according to data.
Seeing stars MARBELLA’S mayor, Ana Muñoz, has reportedly demanded organisers of the Starlite music festival to again add the name of the city to the event’s logo and title, after it was removed previously.
€14m boost BENALMADENA Council has approved €14 millionworth of investment in public projects over the next few months, with the cash to be spent on improving sports centres, roads, Las Palomas park and two new playgrounds.
by Matt Ford SPAIN has launched a crackdown on ruthless Armenian and Georgian mobsters after armed police swooped on 73 addresses across the country with more than 140 suspects held. The mafia-style gang is accused of robbery, extortion, arms, drug and tobacco smuggling, bribery, forgery, funnelling dirty money in and out of the country and rigging sports matches. Investigators said in a statement that the raids had seen arrests in Alicante, Valencia, Albacete, Barcelona and Madrid provinces. The racket is believed to have been run by six high-ranking ‘thieves in law,’ or vory v zakone, in a system which originally formed as a society for ruling the criminal underworld in Russia’s Gulag forced labour camps in the mid-20th century. A probe was sparked by a 2016 double execution in Terrassa, Cataluña, during which Gela Garashvili, the ‘lieutenant’ of Georgian mafia boss Kakhaber Sushanashvili, was killed. Sushanashvili, 46, his brother Lasha and a third man, Erik Djhaginyan, are believed to be
NEWS
War on gang MOB LEADERS: Kakhaber Sushanashvili, left, Kater yna Myerkova, centre, and Lasha Sushanashvili. among the ultimate leaders of the organisation across the European Union. He was last year handed a 15-year money laundering, conspiracy to murder and attempted fraud rap in Spain before being extradited to France where he last week received a further 10-year term for masterminding a string of robberies.
And he will next year face trial for the killing of rival clan leader Vladimir Dzhanashiya, who in 2010 died after walking into a Marseille Hospital riddled with bullets. Lasha Sushanashvili currently languishes in a Greek jail where he is fighting his own extradition to France after being held in 2012.
Shushanashvili’s Ukrainian wife, 32-year-old Kateryna Myerkova, was among 23 suspects held in November last year at the couple’s luxury apartment in central Barcelona. Dubbed ‘the cashier’ by investigators, she allegedly laundered money and dished out the proceeds to the vory. One of the gang’s particular
specialities was employing lower-level thieves, often staying in Spain on three-month tourist visas before being replaced, to steal valuables from private properties, with courier firms used to export the goods to Georgia where they were sold. One of the vory, named locally as Armenak Badalyan, ran the Armenian cell and was arrested in Badalona, Barcelona, during the latest wave of busts. Another branch of the cabal headed by a vory named as Sargis Grigoryan was based in the Levante region where it carried out ‘an enormous number’ of robberies, fixed tennis and basketball matches and smuggled drugs and tobacco on the Costa Blanca and Costa Calida. Detectives added they have not ruled out further arrests with five international warrants issued, but now consider the gang ‘totally dismantled’ in Spain.