Page 193 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

Tackling Environmental Crime throUgh standardized Methodologies

a new booming industry; but, at the same time, it will also offer fantastic oppor-
tunities for the criminals to move into and corrupt this business.

Therefore, we need to find ways to protect the legitimate business and
what we are confronting is a form of economic criminality. I used to work
quite often on economical criminality back in Sweden and I can see similari-
ties as these are often difficult investigations, where large resources need to
be allocated, including highly-skilled personnel specialised in this particular
remit who can work quite closely with prosecutors, who also need to be dedi-
cated to this particular form of crime. I think here lies the problem and the
solution too.

We speak very often about the multidisciplinary approach: easy to say but.
when it comes to practice, perhaps a little more difficult to apply in principle. It
is absolutely necessary to get the different public organisations to work together,
sharing information, pulling the strings in the same directions because, when
fighting economic crimes like environmental crime, we have different stakehol-
ders in the member states involved: it could be the customs, the coastguard, the
police, tax authorities, the prosecution service and magistrates of course.

This needs to be decided at each member state level, given the culture and
legal tradition they have rather than being imposed from Brussels as it has to
do with the fabrics of the countries involved.

In my opinion, a key aspect is accountability and responsibility for such
multidisciplinary approach. When we channel information between different
public organisations in the hope that this will lead to strong transnational inve-
stigations in cooperation with other countries, someone needs to be responsi-
ble and accountable for their results; and I see a problem with the multidisci-
plinary approach as its original accountability is often not clear and, as the
Swedish saying goes, shared responsibility many times equals to no responsibi-
lity. So, accountability is important.

Eurojust is a small organisation with only 56 prosecutors: working closely
with EUROPOL, we have additional support amounting to about 300 persons;
we are operational, so any investigation that needs to seek deep in cooperation
with another country can turn to us for good advice, whether in the form of a
brief talk or a deep involvement over a number of years.

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