Eesti in brief - 2010-11-04

According to the Estonian Alcohol Producers Union, 8.05 million liters of strong alcohol was sold from January to September, which is 926,000 liters less than at the same time last year and they say that the spread of illegal alcohol is behind this drop, reports Delfi. Estonian Alcohol Producers Union board chairman Janek Kalvi said that Estonian alcohol excise tax designers didn’t foresee how the constantly growing alcohol excise tax lures people to take “pointless risks,” with the result being that illegal alcohol has become a scary but profitable mass market business. Kalvi claimed that this year nearly a million liters of illegal alcohol has been sold on the black market. According to the union, strong alcohol producers exported in the first nine months of this year 3.2 million liters of strong alcohol, which forms 29 percent of total production.

The German police together with Estonia and Great Britain discovered an international gang of cyber criminals who are suspected of one of the biggest Internet crimes in German history, reports LETA. There are five Estonian citizens among the suspects. According to the Nordrhein-Westfalen criminal police, the gang members prepared 260 illegal transactions, the total sum of which would have been 1.2 million euros. The fraud was to take place via a Trojan virus installed in computers after users visited certain Web sites. The virus attacked the security gaps in the computer and, when a user looked in his Internet bank, the data was copied and sent to the criminals. The members of the gang did not reach the stage of committing the crime. During the operation Katusha, over 2.5 million computers around the world were examined and among them 400,000 infected computers were discovered in Germany. The police detained two German, one British and five Estonian citizens.

About 100 to 150 elderly Russian citizens picketed their consulate in Narva on Nov. 1 to demand the payment of Russian state pensions, reports LETA. Narva’s population of 66,000 is comprised almost entirely of ethnic Russians, about 35 percent of whom hold Russian citizenship. Vladimir Antipenkov, a lawyer from the Union of Russian Citizens in Estonia, addressed the crowd, reading out a petition to the Russian government. In his address, Antipenkov said that this was the third year in a row that Russian pensioners living in Estonia have not been receiving their state pensions, even though they are guaranteed them by the Russian constitution. He said that Russian officials have forgotten about their citizens, and only remember them during an election year. A written demand to solve the pension problem was delivered to the Consul General. The Consul General refused to speak to the press on the subject.