National Threat Assessment 2008. Organised Crime - Politie

3.4.7 Conclusion
The nature and scale of soil remediation crime cannot be established on the
basis of registers kept by investigating and supervisory authorities. Many of the
companies involved simply perform their activities according to the rules, others
operate ‘on the edge’ of what is permitted and there are also companies that
regularly go ‘over the edge’. One major motive is that a lot of money can be
earned from soil remediation crime. There are many opportunities to commit soil
remediation crimes, as supervision and inspections are insufficient. Furthermore,
the number of remediation operations is not meeting policy objectives. The
chances of being caught are small and the penalties are relatively mild. Measures
have recently been taken to provide support for inspections and supervision, but
they are not expected to have a significant effect in the short term. One crimereducing
factor is the technological development whereby some of the soil can
be cleaned on site. This reduces costs and may also result in less crime. It is not
known how many of these crimes are committed by individual offenders and
how many by organisations, but past cases show that several partners in the
chain are often involved. It is worrying that local government agencies do not
always apply the rules strictly. Soil remediation crime has various consequences
for Dutch society. The main ones are damage to the interests of the public if
buildings are built on contaminated ground, and unfair competition if
companies that do not follow the rules are able to work more cheaply than
others. The scale of soil remediation crime is not expected to increase any further
in the near future, but it will only be reduced if supervision and inspections are
set up in a considerably more intensive and effective manner. As it is unclear
whether or not this is going to be realised in the next few years, soil remediation
crime is a conditional threat to Dutch society.
3.5 Crime involving international waste streams 46
3.5.1 Introduction and scope
With regard to the waste processing market, the research focused on three
waste streams that were considered to be the most relevant within the context
of the NTA, namely:
46
This section is based on a report prepared for NTA 2008: Dienst IPOL, 2008. Criminaliteit bij
internationale afvalstromen. Verslag van een onderzoek voor het Nationaal dreigingsbeeld
2008. Korps landelijke politiediensten (Netherlands Police Agency), Dienst IPOL, Zoetermeer. The
authors of this report are C. Esman and H. Ruessink, both of whom work at the Police Academy.
chapter 3 – Fraud and money laundering
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