National Threat Assessment 2008. Organised Crime - Politie

section. As it was not studied explicitly, it will not be possible to answer all the
questions. The question about the scale of the phenomenon in particular will
have to remain unanswered. We will therefore limit ourselves to a description
of the types, a few practical examples, the possible consequences and the
final conclusion.
Without attempting to formulate a watertight definition, we can describe
corruption in the business community as ‘the incidental and deliberate
participation in or provision of services to criminal organisations, in any way,
by employees and/or employers in the private business community’.
These are people who are not permanent members of a criminal organisation.
If permanent members of criminal organisations use companies, this constitutes
misuse of the companies in question. This subject will be discussed in section
5.6. This present section is about people who are (incidentally) contacted by
members of a criminal organisation for the provision of specific services related
to their field of work.
General context
Corruption in the business community occurs in almost all forms of organised
crime. One of the most obvious examples concerns cargo theft. The research
conducted for this NTA (see section 4.4) revealed that an estimated 80% of
cargo thefts involved ‘help from the inside’. This can vary from leaving a gate
open to providing transport schedules, information about the contents of the
lorries and involvement of the drivers themselves. People in the business
community blame inadequate screening of new staff. However, even though
it never hurts to establish whether future staff have criminal records, this does
not guarantee that corruption will not occur. Not having a criminal record does
not imply that a person is not vulnerable to corruption. It is more important to
use high-quality procedures and impoved data protection. Besides this, it is
unclear whether help from the inside always involves corruption or whether
there are cases of infiltration. In the former case, someone is rewarded for
incidentally providing assistance; in the latter case, a criminal organisation
has had a member infiltrate as an employee.
Schiphol is often mentioned with regard to opportunities for corruption in
the business community. The luggage-handling area is a good example; the
private security firms, hauliers and couriers, and the cleaning companies are
other examples. The corruption at Schiphol usually involves drug smuggling,
human trafficking or human smuggling. Transport hauliers and Customs hauliers
in particular are mentioned as possible targets, as these companies take over
some of the Customs formalities.
chapter 5 – Criminal modus operandi
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