THE BULGARIAN CASE AND DIDIER REYNDERS

Myrianne Coen, off-role embassy counselor*, Ph.D. from the Sorbonne, author of articles and books on the role of criminal organizations in international relations, issued three press releases this past week, which she sent to Kairos. We summarize the main elements in this article, while providing additional information.

In 1996, while working in Sofia, the Belgian diplomat Myrianne Coen discovered a vast network of tourist visas of convenience. Bulgarian mafiosi, with the complicity of embassy officials, organize human trafficking, drug trafficking, arms trafficking and rotten meat(1). Myrianne Coen refuses to take part in this traffic for the benefit of criminal organizations and denounces it to her superiors and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The latter will prefer to flee and will let her down. For more than 20 years, she has resisted the omerta of which the European people are the first victims, practices that  » have ended up exploding bombs in the heart of Brussels « .

« Trafficking in documents is the red thread of organized crime « , declared the Senate already in 1999, a document that is not a simple piece of paper, easily falsifiable for organized crime:  » In one European Union country, Myrianne Coen explained at the time, the number of people arrested from an Eastern European country doubles over a given period of time after the abolition of visas. This means that if this phenomenon were to be verified for all Eastern European countries, it would be necessary to deduce that, with a constant intensity of repression, the visa regime stops half of the criminal activity ! « (2)

« Between 1990 and 1997, capital flight to Bulgaria was through traders, as well as the establishment of architectural offices, art stores and the purchase of real estate in Europe, all of which required visas. By the mid-1990s, this money was mixed with organized crime money and then funneled back into Western banking institutions. (…) Among the nebulous beneficiaries of these visas, Myrianne Coen was able to identify dubious car dealers, so-called modeling companies, shady grain traders, exporters of tainted meat, people wanted by the Bulgarian police, others on file with the Belgian police and, finally, some linked to mafia networks of prostitution, illegal labor and laundering. And many other sinister characters, some of whom have since obtained Belgian nationality and are well established in Brussels, Antwerp and elsewhere!(3)

On March 19, 1997, Myrianne Coen was found unconscious and wounded in the Belgian embassy in Sofia and owed her life only to a subordinate who alerted the emergency services. In vain for more than a year, she denounced to her hierarchy and to the judicial authorities a traffic of documents to members of the Belgian-Bulgarian organized crime and their victims. In the following years, many other embassies will be concerned. Would diplomats who do not bend to the omerta be unwelcome in the career in Belgium? Indeed, since then, successive Ministers of Foreign Affairs have denied him any normal diplomatic career.

DIDIER REYNDERS ACCUSED

Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders, who has been selected for the position of European Commissioner for Justice and Rule of Law, is accused in this case of intimidation, harassment and removing the diplomat from her position. For 25 years of devastated diplomatic career, the professional, social, financial and personal damages are estimated at 5 million €. On the eve of the hearing of the candidate European Commissioner for Justice and the Rule of Law before the European Parliament, the Court of Appeal of Brussels awarded €5,000 in compensation to the diplomat: 0.57 cents per day! The judicial investigation into the practices denounced by Myrianne Coen has seen six investigating judges in succession… We know that a typical procedure to prevent an investigation from succeeding is to regularly dismantle the teams to prevent progress, break morale, place more « conciliatory » people…

THE SILENCE OF JUSTICE

The civil judgment of the Court of Appeal of Brussels (Chamber 18F) has been filed  » in secret  » on September 26, 2019 and communicated on September 1, 2019.October, precisely the day before Didier Reynders’ hearing before the European Parliament for the position of European Commissioner for Justice and Rule of Law, on October 2. Myrianne Coen, who came specially from Italy on the date scheduled for the delivery of the judgment, September 19, 2019, sees it deferred without reason to October 17, 2019… 7820 days after the introduction, on May 20, 1998, of the claim for damages. The ruling was rewritten between September 19 and September 26. Was it written by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the beginning, or revised later? Or the judgment was not finished, in particular because of pressure on the magistrates, who therefore delayed it for a month and were then forced to sign it.

Note that Mireille Salmon is the president of chamber 18F, which is implicated in Fortisgate, which will lead in 2008 to the resignation of the Leterme government for having put pressure on the judiciary in the legal proceedings concerning the contestation of the sale of Fortis to BNP Paribas. In 2008, Fortis lost almost 95% of its value in one year. The bank was dismantled and sold part of its activities to BNP Paribas. The shareholders, considering that this transaction could not take place without their approval, took the matter to court. After the rejection of an application for interim relief before the commercial court requesting a freeze on the dismantling, the shareholders referred the matter to the 18th chamber of the court of appeal, whose president is Paul Blondeel and whose advisors are Christine Schurmans and Mireille Salmon. In Fortisgate, it seems that the judgment is already written:  » Paul Blondeel, points out to the First President of the Court of Appeal, Guy Delvoie, that he can inform the Banking, Finance and Insurance Commission (CBFA) about the content of a judgment… which does not yet exist. And on December 9, experts had already been contacted by Mr. Blondeel to deal with the Fortis case. Without accusing anyone — Mrs. Schurmans does not — this opens up the possibility of a flight to the outside world — to the political and/or financial world -, we understand(4). « Ghislain Londers, first president of the Court of Cassation, will inform the president of the chamber, Herman Van Rompuy, by mail, that the content of the judgment was already known by the government on December 10, whereas it was going to be pronounced on December 12, 2008… This is strangely reminiscent of the writing of the indictment and of the penal transaction of the Kazakhgate by the lawyers of the defense, or of the « Sofia » affair… Move along, nothing to see!

We also discover that Mireille Salmon, who signed the Fortis ruling,  » exchanged e‑mails a few days before the Fortis shareholders’ meeting in February with Lionel Perl, who has since become a director of Fortis Holding »(5). In e‑mails discovered during the investigation by the Ghent Court of Appeal,  » Lionel Perl asked Mireille Salmon for confirmation that a ‘no’ from the shareholders meant that the sale to BNP Paribas would not take place. Mireille Salmon answers negatively. Legally, the sale could therefore be made, according to the judge who considered that the shareholders should be able to express themselves on the sale « (6).  » The phone records between these two individuals indicate that contact intensified markedly as the shutdown approached its final phase. Is it only to prepare the end of the year celebrations that these two « friends », who usually have very little contact, multiply the phone calls? Is it to find one of the « experts » to be named in the judgment? Or is it to « feed » the December 12 ruling? « (7)

The active or passive collaboration of the judiciary with the executive seems to be a system. For more than twenty years, the judicial authorities have been absent from the « Sofia » case and the public prosecutor’s office has been equally silent. The Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has all the evidence. At no time did he collaborate with the judicial investigations, nor did he initiate disciplinary proceedings against the perpetrators. The judicial investigations, opened in 1996, were interrupted under the pretext of « inappropriate prosecution », and then became statute-barred in 2009. The emergency harassment case filed against the Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2005 was referred, without cause, to civil court… in 2012. In its ruling, the Court of Civil Appeals now denies any compensation to the diplomat because no court has convicted officials of either document trafficking or harassment!

A « JUDICIAL CONSTRUCTION » APPLAUDED BY CRIMINAL NETWORKS

It can be seen that this judgment carefully copies the « novel » of the Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs before his judges, and that, as in other cases, it is no longer impartiality that seems to guide the indictments, but the faithfully transcribed interpretations of those accused(8). This is the story: no official of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has ever tampered with visas at the Belgian Embassy in Sofia in the 90s, and certainly never for the benefit of members of criminal organizations and their victims. Myrianne Coen, an embassy counselor, could not suffer reprisals or be discriminated against in her career for refusing to participate in what would not exist or for denouncing it.

Didn’t any Belgian foreign affairs official tamper with visas in the nineties? And none of them since then has protected traffickers by their behavior? It is understandable that those who protect these traffics struggle as best they can to hide the truth. But where the 18th chamber of the Brussels Court of Appeal gets such a certainty remains… a mystery.

Indeed, this seems to contradict the findings of other jurisdictions. In 2004(9), 8 years after the first denunciations, the Belgian Parliament noted  » that Committee R’s investigation shows that there are problems of fraud, corruption and possible connections of Foreign Affairs officers with organized crime. It is also clear that none of the utilities involved have taken appropriate action…the elements that allow these practices to continue have not been eradicated…If these practices have been going on for more than a decade and to this day integrity is still not assured, document fraud can continue to grow. This finding is unacceptable.. In the book  » Belgique en sous-sol, immigration, traite et crime organisé « , we find, in addition to other very enlightening statements from the House and the Senate:  » As for the « Sofia file »: ‘This is a visa fraud that the Parliament has been trying to uncover for years. Parliament only receives a procedural response, which is unacceptable. The lack of openness on this issue inevitably leads some to claim that the Minister of Foreign Affairs is covering up the matter. ». It couldn’t be clearer. In recent years, the trafficking of humanitarian visas for Syrian refugees in exchange for cash is no different(10).

As for the judgment of the correctional court of February 18, 2009, it states:  » A large number of malpractices at the Belgian Embassy in Sofia. The complaints are not about small things, but about scandalous and shameful abuses, sometimes to be qualified as misdemeanors, but often as crimes. However, the court is not seized of this and refrains… Similarly, we do not have to pronounce on the appropriateness of prosecution (and non-prosecution). Who are the authors? The court states: « EVD, owner of a hotel in Greece, was in constant contact with the ambassador. He traveled to Greece several times to stay at this hotel… EVD and his wife regularly came to drop off gifts (…) The accused was actively involved in visa applications for so-called tourists. It is also established… the use of false papers and false reference addresses. That he acted with the aim of receiving a benefit in fortune is obvious ». EVD will be found guilty of forgery, human trafficking and criminal conspiracy. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office has dithered for 13 years. He will therefore benefit from the prescription « . In less diplomatic terms: the public prosecutor’s office is protecting the perpetrators, including this other unnamed but very precisely described member of the criminal association. The correctional court regrets that it does not have the means to pronounce a sentence.

Not only does the 18th Chamber not see what is written in words, but it will also have to repeat its criminology course: impunity leads to recidivism and, through common opportunities, to the widening of the circle of accomplices, while the risks increase for those who refuse to « participate ». Violence, threats, harassment thus become customary weapons of the criminal takeover of a structure that excludes and discriminates: a textbook case in this file.

CONSEQUENCES ?

On the one hand, the « inappropriateness of prosecution » for the perpetrators of trafficking and their protectors. This « non-opportunity » cannot in law be activated by the prosecutor’s office, because there is a victim…  » But who cares about the law in this case « , asks Myrianne Coen. On the other hand, the civil death of Myrianne Coen, the diplomat who tried to protect the victims against these criminals… who thus became a collateral victim of criminal trafficking, a victim who can never be compensated without bringing down the whole edifice.

And the Court of Appeal then continued the novel of Foreign Affairs:  » it was the secretary of the ambassador the guilty (understand: the ambassador, the poor, he knew nothing) . However, the criminal judge refused to convict the secretary: she was only acting on orders and in criminal law, criminal responsibility lies with… the superior. The public prosecutor’s office having organized (for the record, illegally moreover) the non-opportunity of the prosecutions, when it could no longer hide the human trafficking, it had urgently to find guilty. The Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered him on a silver platter: the secretary was just right… an ordinary citizen, without connections and without protections. Depending on whether you are powerful or miserable…

The courts contradict each other… The correctional court says blank, judgment in the form of res judicata. Chamber 18F of the Court of Appeal says black, against all evidence and rationality… What is there still to hide, after 20 years?

Let us add that the judicial investigation had not questioned any of the suspects who were members of the criminal organizations, already internationally reported, nor any of their victims, of human trafficking and all the other traffics… It had also been careful not to identify them and to search for them… The too active investigating judges had been previously dismissed for this purpose. As for the federal prosecutor’s office, it took 13 years to ensure that the statute of limitations had expired. The violence committed at the embassy and the harassment of the diplomat have not been investigated. Johan Leman, former director of the Center for Equal Opportunities, one of the authors of the collective work « L’État gruyère. Mafias, visas and trafficking in Europe » (2002), a civil party in the « Sofia » case, clearly expressing his conviction of corruption in the high administration of the department, will be pressured:  » I was warned that I was involved in too many hot files… Like the conflict with Foreign Affairs about the Belgian embassy in Sofia and the Van Kaap file. »(11).

These unacceptable and indecent facts, the Court of Appeal of Brussels considers them « honourable » in a State of Law, to support its systematic refusal of compensation. In order to strike the witness who for more than 20 years has been seeking protection, the Court is still taking advantage of the reserve that the diplomat has constantly imposed on herself in order not to harm the investigations, is taking advantage of the denials of justice that she has suffered and that were aimed at protecting the « victims » of the crimes committed in the past. friends of friends « , takes advantage of the risks that any witness to the activities of criminal organizations, which so many would like to see disappear, runs.

5,000 € for 25 years of ravaged diplomatic career. The decision of the 18th chamber of the Brussels Court of Appeal sullies its victim and the entire civil service, dishonors Belgian diplomacy and reduces it to insignificance… Intimidation now in the process of spreading to the whole of Europe? A ruling that criminal organizations will be able to take advantage of.

The European Union prescribes the protection of witnesses and victims, and of civil servants in particular, the European Court of Human Rights prescribes the prohibition of discrimination. It also requires states to conduct full and fair investigations… « In the current turmoil, where one reform follows another, I don’t know, I don’t know anymore, if the rule of law will remain for a long time « , said Éliane Liekendael, General Prosecutor at the Belgian Court of Cassation (mercurial, October 1998).

SOVING DIDIER REYNDERS TO EUROPE?

Two court rulings in Brussels on the same day, Thursday, September 26, 2019, pave the way for Didier Reynders’ hearing before the European Parliament on Wednesday, October 2, 2019, for the position of European Commissioner for Justice and Rule of Law,

  • The Court of Appeal of Brussels liquidates for 5 000 €, instead of 5 million, the damages that Myrianne Coen, Doctor of the Sorbonne and Embassy Counsellor, asks the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for 25 years of devastated diplomatic career, since 2011 under the responsibility of Minister Didier Reynders ;
  • - The Brussels Public Prosecutor’s Office is closing the case opened in April 2019 against Didier Reynders for corruption and money laundering without further investigation of the facts.

On the eve of his hearing on October 2, 2019 before the European Parliament, Didier Reynders receives this judgment of the 18th Chamber F of the Brussels Court of Appeal, which he will not have failed to use in the corridors. To neutralize any means of properly informing the European Parliament about this case before this hearing, the judgment will only be sent on October 1, 2019, by mail, to the diplomat victim of such actions who resides in Italy. Is this the reason for the secret postponement of the pronouncement to September 26? If the diplomat had been warned of this date, the press releases would indeed have arrived, before this hearing, in the eyes of the international press…

These are the circumstances that explain the prior staging of the candidate European Commissioner for Justice and Rule of Law. He thus presented himself « in all tranquillity » before the LIBE and JURI Committees of the European Parliament. For safety, a friendly hand was responsible for including in extremis the IMCO commission, chaired by the one who was already his lobbyist (a Belgian deputy of the Green Group!), 3 months earlier, for the candidacy of Secretary General to the Council of Europe which escaped the minister…

THE SILENCE OF THE MEDIA

Since this October 2, 2019, the international press has become silent. As for the Belgian press, if one types « Reynders corruption » on a search engine, one does not find any article since September 27, while pointing out that those published before this period of omerta were of a fabulous indigence… One cannot think that magistrates in Brussels are not to the rescue of Didier Reynders? Belgium has the record of express dismissals to avoid gathering evidence in these cases. When the evidence comes in, Brussels has the record of longevity of non-investigations to protect the perpetrators of crimes and misdemeanors… by prescription.

At times, things are simply summed up:

- Looking for organized crime? Look sometimes to those who say they are fighting it

- Are you waiting to be informed by the media? See what they are not saying and try to realize how much they are part of the problem.

- Do you think that justice is impartial? See who it usually serves

As the two authors of the book Belgique en sous-sol… state,  » After all, it is perhaps not so much a matter of trying to understand why the blackout on the Sofia file was put on, as for whom [il l’a été mis]. Visa trafficking denounced by Myrianne Coenièrent à intermediaries based in Belgium. Most of the time, they were commercial companies with a vague corporate purpose, a changing sign and scattered activities. The latter sent nominative invitations giving access to the national territory to individuals who presented them to the Belgian embassy in the Bulgarian capital in order to obtain, depending on the case, one or several dozen visas. But the most striking thing is not there. It is established that some of these intermediaries had previously been solicited by the embassy itself, in order to send invitations by the hundreds to named individuals. At that time, the ex-number 2 of « Ambabel Sofia » had his attention drawn by all those people to whom the ambassador « K » delivered the precious sesames on a simple initials. She then discovered that among them were people involved in money laundering operations. These funds, laundered in Belgian banks by former agents of the Bulgarian secret services, came from the dying communist regime.  »

The hundreds of billions sent to tax havens, the embezzlement in the Antwerp diamond affair, the Libyan funds, the Kazakhgate, Publifin, Samu social, Dubai Papers, etc. show that everything has become worse since the « Sofia » affair. And meanwhile, they are organizing their « austerity », cutting back on what little is left to schools, hospitals, post offices… This is not a soap opera, another story on Netflix: these are facts, which require you to get up and get off your couches. You have dozed off, history will not hold it against you. If you stand up…

Alexandre Penasse

* Embassy Counselor « out of role » means that titles and functions can be returned.

If you have any new information on this case, or others, a secure contact will be posted shortly on our website info@kairospresse.be and Facebook page.

Notes et références
  1. https://www.dhnet.be/actu/faits/sos-legalita-contre-le-crime-organise-51…
  2. « Belgique en sous-sol, immigration, traite et crime organisé », Frédéric Loore et Jean-Yves Tistaert, Éditions Racines, 2007, extraits disponibles sur google livre.
  3. Ibid.
  4. https://www.lalibre.be/belgique/une-plainte-informative-51b8ac51e4b0de6d…
  5. https://www.rtbf.be/info/belgique/detail_le-fortisgate-revele-des-courri…
  6. Ibid.
  7. https://www.lalibre.be/belgique/exclusif-voici-le-nouveau-scenario-du-fo…
  8. Rappelons que dans l’affaire du Kazakhgate, le projet de transaction pénale et le réquisitoire de l’avocat général auraient été écrits pas les avocats de Patokh Chodiev…
  9. Rapport des Commissions parlementaires de suivi du Comité R, n° 3–725/1 (Sénat) et DOC 511 289/001 (Chambre), 16 juillet’ 04, p. 29, 31 &32.
  10. Notamment: “Trafic de visas humanitaires: Francken affirme n’avoir “rien à cacher””, 18/01/2019. https://plus.lesoir.be/201467/article/2019–01-18/trafic-de-visas-humanit…
  11. Idem.

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