“The mafia is taking possession of the country,” warns one of the country’s highest magistrates in an interview with Le Soir on Thursday.
“We no longer have the capacity to deal properly with economic and financial files (ecofin). We can no longer even deal correctly with those of serious and organized crime! Given the lack of capacity of the federal judicial police (PJF) . It’s something we’ve never experienced.” So that arbitrations are in progress and that “we risk arriving at a situation, if we leave the PJF in such a catastrophic state, where we will decide that such a type of delinquency we will no longer deal with it”, assures Mr. de la Serna.
“The mafia is taking possession of the country” launches the Mons prosecutor, citing for example the “Sky ECC” file, which allowed the seizure of 91 tons of cocaine at the port of Antwerp with a sale value of more than 4, 5 billion euros. More than 2,400 suspects have been identified, of which only 62% were known to the services. More than 600 arrests in 41 operations have been carried out since February 2021. “This is only the tip of the iceberg! (…) But the workload is so heavy that we cannot follow”.
Sky ECC mobilizes full-time more than 700 investigators out of 2,300. So more than a quarter of the human capacity of the PJF is mobilized just on this file, he still points out.